The summer was 6 weeks old and I'd just quit my
job at the ID Bureau for the second time.

I'd quit the first time about a month earlier
because I'd been assigned to fingerprint and photograph the guys
who'd been held in the drunk tank over night. They'd enter my
little cubicle one at a time, I'd ink their fingers and say,
"turn to the right," and take their pictures. They were
often pretty rude while this was going on. Another real negative
about the drunk tank was the music. For decades, drunks held
overnight in the drunk tank had spent their waking hours singing
Irish ballads like "Danny Boy." But just around the
time I was assigned to my duties, they had switched to show
tunes. The hands-down favorite was "The Impossible
Dream."

I told my boss I was sick of drunks singing
"The Impossible Dream" and saying rude things to me all
morning. He was sympathetic and reassigned me to fingerprint and
photograph the guys who had been arrested for assault, arson,
stuff like that. He said now these guys, I promise you, will not
be rude to you.

This turned out to be true, amazingly enough.
They didn't insult me. Actually, they just sort of stared at me.
But somehow, when a guy who had just torched a warehouse was
staring at me, it was worse than when a drunk was insulting me.
I'm not sure why even now.

Anyway I quit and got a job as a Good Humor
man, but I started getting fat and I was actually losing money
because I was eating more than I was selling, so I came back to
the ID Bureau.

Look, I said, I want to work here again, but I
don't want guys insulting me or staring at me. Can we swing that?

The boss said no sweat and made me an autopsy
photographer. No one was rude, no one was polite, no one
stared--at least on purpose-- but after a couple of weeks I
decided enough was enough. Two weeks of dead guys was plenty.

You know what your trouble is? said the boss.
You're never satisfied. You don't like 'em when they're drunk,
you don't like 'em when they're sober, you don't like 'em when
they're dead. You just don't like people. You are not a people
person, and you are doing the right thing quitting the ID Bureau
because people is what this place is all about. He shook my hands
and said there were no hard feelings and that was that. But I had
to get a job because I needed money.

I was fortunate in one respect because I didn't
need a lot of money. I was living in a boarded-up store front and
paying ten dollars a week to Mulberry Street Joey Clams. He could
afford to charge me so little rent because he didn't own the
store front, though I didn't realize this at the time.

So, as I say, I didn't need a lot of money, but
I did need some money so I could eat.

I thought about going back to work for Good
Humor, but that seemed like kind of a rut. 2 weeks at the ID
Bureau, 2 weeks at Good Humor, 2 weeks at the ID Bureau, 2 weeks
at Good Humor. You fall into a pattern like that and one day
you're 58 and you've never held a job for more than 2 weeks, and
on top of that, it's always the same job... no, not for me.

So Mulberry Street Joey Clams got me a job. He
introduced me to a man named Mr. Capalbo. On our way to meet him,
Mulberry Street Joey Clams said, whatever he says, you just say
'yes', okay?

I said okay.

When we shook hands, Mr. Capalbo said, so you
are the man who is going to teach my son Victor to play the
piano, eh?

Yes, I said.

We set up a schedule for Victor's lessons and
agreed to my fee. Mr. Capalbo was a green grocer. I was going to
be paid in bananas, like a gorilla in a Warner Brothers cartoon.

On the way back to the storefront, Mulberry
Street Joey Clams told me I'd handled myself just right.

Thank you, I said. But do you know I can't play
the piano?

It's no sweat, he said. I went to school with
some kids who played it real good and they were real dip shits.
It can't be too hard.

So for the next three weeks I lived on bananas
and I taught Victor Capalbo how to play the piano. At the end of
three weeks Victor and his dad decided that he wasn't really cut
out to play the piano. Do you also by any chance also teach the
trumpet? asked Mr. Capalbo.

Alas, no, I said.

I had stockpiled enough bananas to make it to
the end of the summer, and I would have, but one day I was
walking home from the park and guys with tattoos were moving
washing machines into my storefront. I ran to Mulberry Street
Joey Clams' house and asked him what was going on. He told me the
place was being turned into a laundromat. I said, but for
Christ's sake, I live there, I'm paying rent!

Yeah, he said, but you're paying rent to me,
and the thing is, technically, I don't own it. I just kind of
busted in and put my own lock on it, you know?

I don't understand how this is possible, I
said.

Well, he said after a long time, what can I
tell you? There it is.

There it was.

* *

CUBING THE CAR

There was nothing I had previously seen in the
movies that had the impact of the cube scene in Goldfinger.
There's a gangster named Mr. Solo (I remember the name because I
found myself wondering if he was related to Napoleon Solo in
The Man from U.N.C.L.E-- maybe a creepy older brother,
Mussolini Solo or Genghis Khan Solo or something) who gives
Goldfinger a hard time, so Goldfinger has Odd Job drive Mr. Solo
to a junk yard where Odd Job shoots Mr. Solo, leaves him in the
car, and watches with an amused expression as the car containing
Mr. Solo is picked up by a crane and dumped in a huge machine
which crushes it into a cube about the size of a sofa cushion.

"Is that TRUE???" I whispered to my
father.

"Of course not. It's a movie. These guys
are actors."

"No, no, no! That machine! Is that real?
Can they do that to a car?"

"Of course. Saves a lot of space at the
dump."

"Can we get that for our car?"

"What?"

"When our car is too junky to drive
anymore, can we have it cubed? Can we?"

"Watch the movie, will you?"

"Can we, can we, can we?"

"Sure," said my father. The movie
continued, there was some stuff involving spies and atom bombs
and Fort Knox, but certainly nothing as exciting as that car
getting cubed. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more
certain I became that NOTHING I had ever seen was as exciting as
that car getting cubed.

I couldn't wait for our car-- a green and white
'55 Chevy Bel Air-- to shuffle off this mortal coil. Although I
didn't mention it to anyone, I cleared a spot in my room where
the Chevy would go, between the cardboard box I used for storing
my rubber masks and the bookcase containing every paperback novel
I could find with a picture of either a floating eye ball or a ax
wielding maniac on the cover. I figured I would screw some wheels
or casters in the bottom of the cube, so I could move it around
more easily; it would probably be pretty heavy. I would be the
first kid I knew who was using the old family car as a
nightstand.

'Cool looking table,' my friends would say.

'Yeah,' I'd reply, looking up from my copy of
Martian Time Slip. 'Does it look familiar?'

'Sort of, yeah... but... naaahhh...'

'Yup. It's the old Chevy.'

'Whoa! Yeah! There's that scratch in the hood!
An' there's the dashboard clock that doesn't work! Man, this is
so cool!'

We'd put our soda cans on it and talk about how
cool it was. I'd do my homework on it. My grades were bound to
improve if I was doing my homework on THE CUBE. When I was older,
it would be the coolest thing in my incredibly cool apartment.
I'd have my feet up on the cube while the lava lamp pulsed to the
Today Sounds of Nancy Sinatra.

"So, Dad," I said after dinner one
night, "think it's time for a new car? The Chevy was making
some odd sounds today when you pulled in."

"Ah," he said, "she's got a few
years left in her."

"Dad," I said, my voice dropping into
the register I used to convey sincerity, "I worry about you
driving that old wreck. When it gets to be 5:15, 5:20, and you
aren't home yet, I... I cross my fingers, Dad, I cross my
fingers. I pray. 'Lord,' I say, 'please don't let that right rear
wheel, which has been looking sort of wobbly lately, shear off as
my Dad is changing lanes on Route 46, right at that real nasty
merge at the junction of Route 3. Or, if it HAS to shear off
right there, PLEASE don't let there be one of those huge 18
wheelers barreling along just a few yards behind, but if there
is, PLEASE let the driver have recently had his brakes checked,
because a lot of times people let that go.'"

"I'm touched," said my father, but he
didn't look touched.

"Dad," I said, "safety
considerations aside... and your obligations to the surviving
members of your family also aside, I really think it's time to
get a new car."

"Why?"

"Because YOU DESERVE IT," I cried,
and attempted to give him a big affectionate hug. The attempt
failed because of the Jim Brown-esque straight arm he applied.

"I'm trying to figure your angle here. I
don't get it. Why do you want to dump the Chevy?"

"I'm only thinking of you," I choked.
Actually, I was thinking of THE CUBE. For some reason I was
envisioning it in my room, doing a hootchie-cootchie dance. I
shook my head violently to dislodge the image.

Eventually my father bought a new car. There
was a rough period when I was afraid that he was going to trade
in the Chevy, or even sell it, but that didn't happen; my sister
had acquired her driver's license and she inherited the ancient
vehicle. But she didn't have it for long...

I was in my room painting my Aurora model of
The Mummy when my mother gave me the terrible news. "There's
been an accident," she said. "Now, don't get upset.
Your sister is okay. She broke one of her front teeth on the
steering wheel, but she's fine otherwise. She was--"

"The steering wheel? Was she in the
car?"

"Yes. She--"

"The Chevy?"

"YES. She was only going 10 miles an hour,
and--"

"What happened to the car?"

"That's what I'm trying to tell you. She
was--"

"No, I don't mean how did it happen, I
mean is the car all smashed up?"

"Yes. She--"

"HOO-HAH! I mean, gosh, I sure hope Pam is
okay." And I did, too; my heart swelled with brotherly
affection. Thanks to Pam, I was going to get THE CUBE, at last!

Well, actually, I wasn't. The car really was
cubed, but I didn't get the cube. I did get to watch; I screamed
"DIBS! I GOT DIBS ON THE BEL AIR!" but the gentlemen in
the scrap yard ignored me. "But, Dad," I wailed as we
turned in our steel helmets and headed for the gate, "I want
that cube! I've earned it! I'll never ask for anything again if
you get me that cube!"

"If you can carry it, you can have
it," he said. "Here. Try this one. This one looks like
it might have been a Chevy."

I had, of course, expected the cube to be
heavy. But for some reason it had never occurred to me that it
would weigh... well, as much as a CAR. And, close up, the cube
was much bigger than I had thought, too. Too big to make a good
nightstand. Too big, even, to get in the door of my bedroom.

Defeated by the laws of physics, I left the
scrap yard and went home, cubeless as the day I was born.

PERP WALK

I was sitting in my cubicle at the Passaic
County ID Bureau, ostensibly checking jury duty lists for
convicted felons, but in fact drawing Bug Monsters on the backs
of the file cards. I was relaxing. It had been a busy morning--
in addition to the usual assortment of drunks in the overnight
holding tanks, we had an authentic murder/arson suspect awaiting
arraignment. I had flipped a coin with Jackson, the other
worthless teenage summer temp on the staff, to see who would get
to do the fingerprinting and take the mug shot, and I'd won,
while Jackson had been stuck rinsing specimen jars in the morgue
annex. Jackson was still rinsing specimen jars, and I was drawing
Bug Monsters, and all was right with the world.

There was a clanging and a bit of a commotion
on the other side of my cubicle. The occupants of the holding
tanks were being brought through the ID Bureau, en route to
arraignment in the county courthouse across the street. One of
the drunks was making a stink. I recognized his voice-- it was a
fellow named Mike, who, in addition to D & D, was being
charged with a variety of breaches of the peace stemming from his
having smashed the TV set at his neighborhood bar with a stool
during Monday Night Football. He'd heard one Howard Cosell
sentence too many, was how he'd explained it when I was printing
him. He was arguing with the cops about needing a hat. "I
can't go out there without a hat," he said, "I gotta
have a hat over my face, or my picture'll be inna paper."

"Nobody wants to see your picture,
buddy," said a cop, "They want to see Mr.
Shake-and-Bake here."

"But they'll take everybody's picture!
They don't know what he looks like! We're both named MIKE! What
if they screw up and put his name under my picture?"

"That could never happen," said one
of the cops. "These newspaper people are
professionals." This set off uproarious laughter from
everyone within earshot except the unfortunate Mike.

"C'mon, you guys! Give a guy a break!
Gimme a coat or a hat!"

"Look, you put a hat over your face,
they'll definitely take your picture. They love that."

"Please!"

"How about a bag?" said one cop.
"We could stick a paper bag over your head."

"Yeah," said another cop. "That
kid who's always drawing cockroaches could draw a face on
it." More laughter.

"C'mon, you guys."

"Well, you can't have my coat. I ain't
gonna be in the paper in my shirtsleeves. Hey, where is that kid?
Doesn't he have a jacket he's always wearing?"

I did indeed. It was my Order of the Arrow
jacket from my Boy Scout days, a fake suede item with 'W W W'
embroidered on the back (The initials stood for the Lenapi Indian
slogan 'Wimmachatendiak Wingolousik Witahemway,' which probably
translate as 'Please Kick Me') and my name ("JEFF")
stitched on the front, and a variety of grotesque patches I had
sown on all over the place. It was the most hideous jacket in the
world and I loved it. It was draped over the back of my chair. I
leaned over and swept out a file drawer with the idea of hiding
my jacket until it was all clear, but the scream of the drawer
grinding open on its metal tracks alerted everyone to my location
and before I had even straightened up, a beefy cop-type hand was
balling up my jacket and tossing it over the wall of my cubicle.
"Here we go," said the cop. "Stick this over your
head on the way up the steps."

"Ah, come ON," said Mike. "Ain't
there another jacket??"

"Guy don't like your jacket," the cop
said to me.

"I want that back," I said.

"Relax. This is a borrow." Before I
could reply, the entire parade of cops, drunks, and arsonists was
out the door and heading for the courthouse steps. I frantically
shuffled all my file cards together so no one would see the Bug
Monsters and followed at my top speed, a slow trot. There was a
gauntlet of reporters and photographers on the steps waiting for
the arsonist, who was the first prisoner up the steps, head high
and uncovered. Flashbulbs exploded pointlessly in the bright
sunlight. The rest of the crew waited across the street until the
arsonist was safely inside the courthouse, and then Mike the TV
Smasher was brought in, my jacket hung over his head, ála the
Elephant Man. Photographers who had begun to drift away, lighting
cigarettes and checking their watches, suddenly scrambled for
their cameras and fired away. "What the hell is that thing
on his head?" someone cried.

The next day, both Mikes appeared on the front
page of most papers-- Mike the Arsonist under his own name, and
Mike with My Jacket On His Head as "unknown suspect."

Of course, he was not unknown to anyone
familiar with the jacket. My phone was ringing when I got home.

"Oh, so you made bail," said my
uncle. "What's the scoop?"

I explained about the confiscation of my
jacket. My uncle snorted in derision and hung up. The phone rang
again. All of my friends wanted to know what I'd done. My Aunt
Jane called and without preliminary said "It's not drugs,
is it?" At least two people, including one that I barely
knew, asked to borrow my jacket. Over the next few days I
discovered the world was divided into guys who no longer spoke to
me and guys who wanted to be my new best friend; into girls I'd
known all my life who crossed the street to avoid me and girls
I'd never spoken to who suddenly gave me their phone numbers. It
was amazing. And one of the out of town papers had, as Mike With
My Jacket Over His Head had predicted, run his picture and
labeled him Mike the Arsonist; which is to say they'd labeled ME
Mike the Arsonist. I began to get used to people calling up
asking for Mike.

Meanwhile, my jacket had not been returned, and
tracking it down was long and arduous; it had been in the custody
of a guard at the courthouse, of a janitor, of a social worker,
of virtually everyone employed by the City of Paterson or the
county of Passaic. I have up all hope of ever seeing it again
after about three weeks. By now most people had stopped calling
me 'Mike' and asking whom I'd murdered. Heartbroken, I began
drawing the jacket on my Bug Monsters.

A month after Mike's perp walk, a cop strolled
over to my cubicle and dropped the jacket on top of some files I
was defacing. "You don't even want to know where I found
this," he said. I didn't ask, just thanked him profusely. I
wore the jacket home, and for the first time in weeks someone
hollered "Yo, MIKE."

I decided to put the jacket away for a while,
until I was certain the entire incident was forgotten.

Which should be any day now.

A COLLECTION OF SPORTS

One morning while we were rooting through boxes
in Picarillo's attic looking for his dad's World War II
souvenirs, Calvano found an old 78 rpm record. "Hey,"
he said, "This one's not busted. I think it's a song about
CARS." We loved songs about cars, so we tramped downstairs
and slapped the ancient piece of acetate on the ancient
phonograph. Calvano had read the label backwards, and it turned
out that singer was Cab Calloway, not the song, which was
"Minnie the Moocher." This is the song with the refrain
that goes "Hi-Dee-Hi-Dee-Hi-Dee-Hi;" first Cab sings
"Hi-Dee-Hi-Dee-Hi-Dee-Hi," and then the chorus responds
"Hi-Dee-Hi-Dee-Hi-Dee-Hi," and there's just a hell of a
lot of 'hi-dee-hi-ing' and 'ho-dee-ho-ing.' we thought it was the
greatest song we'd ever heard (which it probably was, given most
of the stuff we listened to), and decided to share it. We spent
about half an hour dialing random numbers and singing out
"HI DEE HI DEE HI DEE HI!" to the baffled folks who
shared our phone exchange. Most of these people hung up or yelled
at us, but the 8th caller belted out the
'Ho-Dee-Ho-Dee-Ho' response without hesitation. We were struck
speechless. "So what do I win?" asked caller number 8.

"Um-- Uncle Tug??" I stammered.

"Ah-- my beloved nephew! Just the man I
wanna see. You and the rest of the Cab-O-Liers shuffle on over
here, I got a MISSION." He hung up. Since he was a grown-up,
we had no choice but to shuffle on over.

"Hop in the car, boys, we gotta pick up a
sports collection. Guy lost to me big time in a poker game day
before yesterday and it might be I need a hand loading up the
car." We perked up immediately-- we were going to help Uncle
Tug collect on a gambling debt!

"Wow!" cried Calvano. "And also,
if the guy doesn't wanna pay up, we could lean on him for
you!" It was like a dream come true. We scrambled into the
car. Moments later we were on the Garden State Parkway. An hour
later, after several spirited renditions of "Minnie the
Moocher," we were still on the Garden State Parkway.

"Unca Tug," I said, "Where does
this guy live?"

"Atlantic City," said Uncle Tug.

"Sh-shouldn't we of, um, called up our
parents and told 'em where we're going?" asked Picarillo.

"Nah. They'd wanna know why and
next thing you know they'd be telling you no. Then where
would you be? Not in this car. Not on the way to ATLANTIC CITY.
Which is the city they stole all the streets in Monopoly
from."

"Wow! Can we go to Park Place??"

"Nah. But I'll guy you guys some actual
Atlantic City cheeseburgers."

"Wow!"

Soon we were chowing down in an incredibly
crummy diner. Tug ordered a steak: "'Rare. I mean rare. I
want it to moo when I stick the fork in it." The three of us
howled with appreciative laughter at this bon mot. Calvano
scribbled it into the notebook he always carried in his back
pocket. He would use the phrase to excellent effect in the school
cafeteria next fall.

When the hilarity died down, Calvano asked,
"Are we getting' paid for helping you out here?"

Once we finished eating, we drove past the
amazing Elephant Motel-- a motel actually shaped like an
elephant, surely the most beautiful building any of us had ever
seen without using a Viewmaster-- and pulled into the driveway of
a seedy boarding house. Tug rang the bell. An older man in a
smoking jacket answered the door and shook hands with Tug, who
waved us in. "Santa's little helpers," Tug explained to
the man. "Boys, this is Mr. Marcy."

"Charmed," said Mr. Marcy. He shook
hands with us gravely, and fitted a cigarette into a holder.
After some strained chitchat, he led us into the room that housed
his collection. Tug's mouth dropped open.

"This isn't a sports collection!"

"I didn't say 'sports collection.' I said
'collection of sports,'" said Mr. Marcy.

"Where's the sports?"

"These are my sports," said Mr.
Marcy. "'Sports' is another word for 'freaks of
nature.'"

Mr. Marcy's collection consisted of a great
many items, many of them jars filled with formaldehyde. Odd
misshapen figures floated in the jars. Some of them had two or
more heads. Tug was momentarily speechless, but Picarillo and
Calvano and I drifted among the exhibits, mouths wide open.

"A one eyed owl!"

"A hand with 6 fingers!"

"Some kinda lizard with FIVE LEGS!"

"No, no, no," said Tug. "This is
no go. I can't take this junk. How can I move it? Who the hell
wants a lizard with 5 legs?"

"ME!" we all cried at once.

"Forget it. I want cash," said Tug.

"Uncle Tug!" I screamed. "Have
you gone NUTS?? This guy's got a frog with TWO MOUTHS!"

"Boys," said Tug, "Let's have a
moment of silence--"

"HEY!" said Calvano. "This two
headed baby is made outta RUBBER!" Calvano had opened one of
the jars and was holding a dripping figure in his hand. Out of
the dark fluid, it was clearly identifiable as a Betsy-Wetsy doll
with a second head affixed to the trunk, The second head,
slightly smaller, was from a Chatty Cathy doll.

"What are you tryin' to pull here?"
snarled Tug.

"Only the human items are bogus,"
said Mr. Marcy. "There are laws about such things, after
all."

Tug glared.

"You want we should lean on him?"
said Calvano.

"Ah, the lads are learning a trade,"
said Mr. Marcy.

"Who are you callin' LADS?" said
Picarillo. Mr. Marcy and Tug went into the other room for a few
moments, leaving us among the floating sports, real and fake.
When they returned, Tug looked mollified.

"We're all square," said Tug.
"Let's hit the road, boys."

"Wait a minute-- are you LEAVING all these
jars??"

"You bet."

"Unca Tug! Don't do it! Whatever he gave
you, it's some kind of a trick!"

"It's cold cash, boys. The best trick of
all."

"Hey Mister," said Picarillo,
"How much for the lizard with the five legs?" Mr. Marcy
did not answer. Tug motioned us all into the car. We sat in the
back, sure that Tug had made a terrible mistake in passing up Mr.
Marcy's collection in favor of mere MONEY, which after all, you
could get ANYWHERE. Tug joined us moments later, a small box
under his arm. We drove off.

We were Hi-Dee-Hi-Dee-Hi-Dee-Ho-ing somewhere
just south of the Essex County toll plaza when Tug told us to
open up the box. It contained, wrapped in tissue paper, three
fake exhibits from the collection-- the six fingered hand, the
plaster cast of a set of teeth with enormous, Dracula-like
incisors, and a baby doll with lobster claws.

"Use them wisely, boys. Don't let them
fall into the wrong hands. And whatever you do, don't tell
anybody where you got 'em." He slowed down for the toll.
"There are laws, you know what I'm saying?"

A Cow Pie

I heard the following story from several people
and I believe it is substantially true, but I have changed the
names of the various people, companies, and countries involved,
and there are a few gaps in the sequence of events that, try as I
might, I was unable to account for.

The Buoyant Energy Corporation was about to
embark upon a major project in Eastern Europe and needed to set
up a team in, oh, let's call it Slovoland. They sent one Peter
Dingle to coordinate things, smooth over whatever needed to be
smoothed over with the local officials, and so forth. Buoyant
likes to use as much local talent as possible, and Peter hired
Karl, a native Slovonian with an engaging manner and an
impressive background in computers, to head up the data
processing department. Things would get rolling in short order,
but first, Karl was supposed to spend two weeks at Buoyant
Headquarters in the US-- Hunterdon County, in fact-- where he
would receive special training. For his part, Karl professed to
be delighted at this opportunity to spend some time in America--
"A see-vilized Con-tree," as Karl put it, with which he
had become very familiar over the years thanks to many episodes
of "Kojak."

Peter booked a room for Karl at a motel near
Boyant's corporate HQ; he called the motel several times on the
evening that Karl was scheduled to arrive, but Karl never checked
in; he called the airline, and established that the plane had
landed on time, and that Karl was on board. When he got to work
the next morning Peter found a message from Karl in his voice
mail: "Isn't a LIMO goink to drive me to my hotel? Is there
a bar in the hotel? Hello?" On a hunch, Peter called the
Holiday Inn near JFK airport, and there was Karl.

"Just take a cab and get out here,"
said Peter.

"I can not. You must come and get me, and
pay my hotel bill." So Peter set out to the Holiday Inn, but
Karl wasn't there. Karl did not return to his room that day;
Peter did not hear from or of Karl for two days, when he got a
call from a bakery in New York. Karl was sleeping in the bakery.
How he got to the bakery is one of those gaps I referred to
above. He was snoring away in the proof box, which I gather is a
chamber in which pans of bread are placed in order to 'proof,' or
rise; the guy from the bakery intimated that given Karl's
condition, they ought to call it the 60 proof box. In any case,
the bakery employees found one of Peter's business cards in
Karl's pocket, and asked him if he would please retrieve his
friend. Peter drove out to the bakery and collected Karl, now
more or less awake.

"Where are your bags?"

"I don't know."

They went back to the Holiday Inn, where the
bags were, and Peter paid the bill.

"Where are we goink?"

"To the motel."

"Take me to a bar."

"No."

"I see. Pear-haps I haf been mis inFORMed
about the level of see-vilization in thees con-tree."

Peter got Karl up to his room, and told him
that he should report to work at 9:00 AM the next morning. Just
to make sure, Peter sent his assistant Marian to pick Karl up and
deliver him to the Buoyant building.

When came down to the lobby the next morning,
Marian was surprised-- to say the least-- to see that, instead of
a standard business suit, Karl was dressed in army fatigues and
combat boots. I have no idea why, but every person who's told me
the story agrees on this point. Possibly Karl had learned how
Americans dress for work from old Chuck Norris movies.

Karl's training commenced at approximately 9:10
AM. At 9:15 AM, he asked to be directed to a rest room. At 9:30
AM, the guard who had been sent to look for him reported that he
was no longer in the rest room, if he had ever been there. Since
he was dressed like an extra from A Few Good Men, he
should have been pretty easy to spot, but he wasn't. Some time
later, when Peter and Marian were looking under cars in the
parking lot, they asked a couple of co-workers returning from
lunch if they'd seen anybody in combat boots around.

"Sure. We just gave him a ride to the
motel. He said he wanted to get something from his room."

The something he'd wanted to get was a six
pack.

At this point, his apparently inexhaustible
patience exhausted, Peter told Karl to pack his things and get
ready for a plane ride back to Slovoland. Peter personally put
Karl in the limousine and told the driver to make sure Karl got
on the plane.

"Take me to a bar," Karl told the
driver.

"Nope."

"A cow pie," said Karl, nodding
sadly.

Several hours later, the limo driver phoned
Peter to report that Karl had gone to use the mens room at the
airport and never returned. And no, he did not get on the plane.

Is Karl still at large in this cow pie of a
con-tree? No; at some point he must have boarded a plane, because
a few weeks later, when the Buoyant Corporation opened its
Slovoland Office, Karl showed up to take charge of the data
processing division. And was SHOCKED when he was informed that
his services would not, after all, be required.

He is reported to have concluded his career at
the Buoyant Corporation with the immortal words: "How can
this be? Was all my training in America for NOTHING?"

LITTLE MISTER KISSY LIPS

Over the years I've met dozens of people from
Texas, and not one of them ever knew what a Hot Texas Wiener was;
and that makes sense, because these wieners are indigenous not to
Texas, but to a tiny strip of road in northern New Jersey.

The thing that separates the Hot Texas Wiener
from the everyday hot dog is the special Hot Texas Wiener sauce,
which, Calvano once speculated, was made up of the same 20 or so
flammable and explosive ingredients which Daffy Duck swills down
at the climax of one of our favorite Warner Brothers cartoons,
following which he swallows a lit match, following which Daffy
blasts through the ceiling like a Roman candle; and if we never
blasted through the ceiling, it was only because we left out the
lit match. We loved Hot Texas Wieners, and whenever the weather
was reasonably clement and there was no school, we would all hop
on our bikes and race down Paterson Avenue, which turned into
McBride Avenue at the West Paterson border and finally terminated
inside the city limits of Paterson itself where the Passaic River
made a right turn and plunged over The Great Falls. The last
couple of blocks before the Falls were lined with Hot Texas
Wiener joints.

Normally it took us only about half an hour to
arrive in the Hot Texas Wiener District, but today Picarillo was
slowing us down. His left leg was in a cast from mid-thigh to
mid-calf and he was pedaling with only one leg. The broken leg
was sticking out at an angle and he nearly smacked it into a
parked car about once every 30 seconds. He was terrified and
whimpering and drenched with sweat, but there was no way he was
going to pass up a breakfast of Hot Texas Wieners.

This was not strictly a Hot Texas Wiener run;
we were also planning to hit the Army-Navy surplus store and pick
up some gas masks, which at that time went for about 2 bucks a
piece. Halloween was coming. The plan called for us to have two
or three Hot Texas Wieners, then cycle through the really ratty
part of Paterson past this decrepit building with plywood sheets
nailed over the windows and chains wrapped around the doorknobs.
These aspects alone would have made it one of our favorite
buildings, but the clincher was the legend carved in stone above
the main entrance: PATERSON BOARD OF HEALTH. Rumor had it that
the actual Paterson Board of Health had moved to a different
location, but we sincerely hoped not. Anyway, after we'd paid our
respects there, we would stop at the Army-Navy store for twenty
minutes or so, trying on different gas masks until they made us
buy something. Then back to McBride Avenue for a hearty lunch of
Hot Texas Wieners. This schedule meant that breakfast and lunch
would be eaten approximately 45 minutes apart, and that was kind
of excessive even for us, but there was no way around it unless
we were willing to have something other than Hot Texas Wieners
for lunch, and we weren't.

We stopped at Ducky's for breakfast. Calvano
and I waited in the parking lot as Picarillo gamely pedaled
toward us; not only was his leg in a cast, but the cast was
wrapped in ace bandages. This because Picarillo had fallen asleep
during the health class movie which starred a talking molar.
While he was asleep, and the lights were out, someone had taken
an indelible black marker and written on his cast JUST CALL ME
LITTLE MISTER KISSY-LIPS, and further enhanced the message by
drawing flowers, hearts, and kissy-lips. Naturally Picarillo had
been mortified; he'd painted the cast with red house paint, but
the words still bled through. If anything, the bright red cast
only made the message more noticeable. The black marker had cost
$2.50, an incredible price for those days, but Calvano and I
agreed it had been worth every penny.

Picarillo finally rolled into the parking lot.
He had lost the ace bandage somewhere and he was soaking wet, but
he was ready for breakfast. "Hey, you guys, you can't read
what it says under the paint, can you?"

"Absolutely not," I assured him. We
pretty much had to carry him in, since he was unable to walk
without his crutches, and didn't bring them along. Calvano and I
were hoping he would fall asleep again, so we could outline the
letters in white.

"What'll it be, boys?" said Ducky.
Ducky was sitting behind the counter lighting a cigarette with
the end of the old one. All the counter men at the Hot Texas
Wiener Joints did this, all day long. Probably some regulation
from the Board of Health.

"Six Hot Texas Wieners, Ducky,"
Picarillo said. Ducky nodded and called back to the kitchen:

"SIX ALL THE WAY FOR LITTLE MISTER
KISSY-LIPS!"

Picarillo made a noise like a refrigerator
being unplugged: "Mmmwwaarrghhhh." Calvano slapped him
on the back. We maneuvered Picarillo into a booth and waited for
our breakfast. "Man, when I find out who wrote this on my
cast, I'll... I'll..."

Ducky came over with the wieners. "Some
chow for Little Mister Kissy Lips and friends."

"There is no way we can come back here for
lunch," Picarillo said.

Calvano nodded. "I've always felt these
were breakfast Hot Texas Wieners anyway. But consider this,
Picarillo: do you want ALL the Hot Texas Wiener guys in town
calling you Little Mister Kissy-Lips?"

Picarillo went white. "We GOTTA eat lunch
here," he whispered. We each ordered one more wiener to tide
us over the interminable 45-minute wait before lunch, and then we
made our way to the surplus store.

"This is gonna be the greatest Halloween
ever!" said Calvano. "Instead of, like, monsters, which
everybody knows we really aren't, we're gonna look like GUYS IN
GAS MASKS, which we could really be!"

"Once we have the gas masks on, we WILL
really be," I pointed out.

"YEAH! YEAH!" We quickly paid for our
gas masks, put them on, and headed back to Ducky's. We had never
worn gas masks on our bikes before. The smell of the thick black
rubber was intoxicating. We were all sweating profusely. It was
great. We chained our bikes to Ducky's propane tank. Calvano and
I supported Picarillo and we hobbled to the diner. Our goggles
were completely fogged up. The customers roared as we walked in
the door.

"Hey, Ducky," called a guy at the
counter, "I wanna wear a gas mask when I come in this joint,
too!"

We were banished from Ducky's forever.
"Picarillo, if you hadn't been wearing that stupid cast, he
never woulda known it was us," snarled Calvano. Picarillo
refused to enter another other H.T.W. place as long as the cast
was on. We waited by the propane tank, trying to bribe grown-ups
into bringing us take-out to eat in the parking lot, like
underage hoodlums hanging around outside the liquor store, but
our gas masks made everybody nervous and nobody would help us
out. We could not obtain Hot Texas Wieners at any price.

THE USE OF FLOSS

Cockroaches had taken over my kitchen, and it
had driven me insane. I was setting off insecticide bombs three
times a week. I was jerry-rigging flamethrowers with matches and
Lysol spray cans. The roaches didnt care. They thought it
was funny. They invited all the other roaches in Manhattan to the
never-ending party in my kitchen: "Hey you guys! Grimshaw
just bought a cupcake and he left it on the counter! Come on
over! Wait till you see the look on his face when he sees us
dancing on the icing!"

I was killing roaches by the hundreds every day
and nothing happened except more roaches arrived. I was losing
it. I figured maybe the trouble was the tiny brain of the roach:
Id wipe out 80, flush the bodies away, and the survivors
just wouldnt remember what had happened.

So I decided to find one single roach, and make
an example of him that the rest of the roaches would never
forget.

I went into the hall and banged on the door of
the next apartment. "Hi," I said, "Im your
next door neighbor. Can I borrow some dental floss?"

"You want to borrow some dental
floss?"

"Yes."

"Borrow? You mean youll give it back
when youre done with it?"

"I just need a foot or so--"

"And-- I just want to get this straight--
when youre finished using it, youll give it back,
right? Because thats what borrow means, right?
It means when youre done, you give it back, right.
Because--"

"HACK!" The guy Id been
speaking with was a short, emaciated guy wearing a rayon shirt
with a pocket pen protector. The guy who had just bellowed
"HACK!" was a towering figure wearing a ratty looking
pair of gym shorts, wrap around sunglasses, and nothing else.

"HACK! Just give him the goddamn dental
floss and shut up! You make me crazy!"

Here, I felt, was a man I could relate to.

"Im not going to use it to floss
with," I explained while Hack sullenly went to the bathroom
to get the stuff. "Im going to hang a cockroach with
it."

The guy in the sunglasses smiled. "No
kidding? Can I watch?"

"Sure." We introduced ourselves. his
name was Stu Schunk. His roommate was Tom Hack. Even though they
had names like a turn of the century vaudeville team, they were
architecture students at Cooper Union. Theyd met while
looking for an apartment and they didnt discover until a
week or so after theyd moved in together that they hated
each other.

"Hey HACK," called Stu, "What
are you doin in there? Come on!"

"Im looking for your dental
floss."

"I dont use dental floss, stupid.
Only creeps like you use dental floss. Give him some of your
dental floss."

Hack came out with a tiny strand of dental
floss.

"If you dont floss, your teeth are
going to rot out of your head."

"Yeah!" said Stu. As if to say, ah,
how glorious to be young, clinically insane, and have your teeth
rotting out of your head.

"I want this back," said Hack.

"Hack," said Stu, "hes
going to hang a cockroach with it."

The corners of Hacks mouth twitched.
"Can I watch?"

"Sure," I said.

We crossed the hall to my apartment. "This
is the roach," I said, pointing out a hefty specimen
Id already laid out on the stovetop. Id killed him
with a squirt of Ivory Liquid. [ROACH STOPPERS TEXT BOOK TIP 173:
Nothing seems to kill a roach as quickly and painfully as a blast
of dishwashing detergent-- and it preserves the corpse as well!]

Schunk and Hack were both disappoint that the
roach was already dead, but they both brightened up considerably
when my first attempt to tie the floss around the roachs
neck resulted in his head popping off.

"HACK! Get some of my airplane glue!"

"No!" said Hack. "Lets
kill a new roach!"

"YEAH!"

Hack ran back to his apartment to get more
dental floss. We were spraying Ivory Liquid and Windex at every
roach stupid enough to amble into the open. Our eyes were tearing
from the concentration of toxic fumes and we were laughing
wildly.

Within a half-hour, we had something like 50
roaches dangling from the wainscoting. We pooled our money and
sent Hack out to buy 6 dollars worth of dental floss.
"Man," said Stu, "this is the greatest thing
Ive ever seen. And it was. It was like the last seen of Sparticus,
only with cockroaches. "Lets pick up some chicks and
bring them back here to see this!"

"Yeah!" We laughed again, and
suddenly there was a "MmmnnuuuggGGHHHH!!" from the
ceiling.

"What the hell was that?" I said.

"Havent you ever heard that before?
Its Box Boy. Box Boy lives right upstairs. Hes got
this big black box the size of a Volkswagen in the middle of his
apartment. Its padded. When he gets upset, he crawls into
the box and screams."

"Jesus, what a maniac!" I said.

"Yeah," said Stu.

"MmmmnnnuuugggGGGHHH," said Box Boy.
We shook our heads and waited for Hack to get back with the floss
so we could hang some more roaches from the ceiling and then pick
up some chicks.

* * *

BEAN BAG CHAIR

We were going to hang out in Calvano's
basement, but his brother Duff had recently moved down there and
created a swinging bachelor pad by slapping a couple of slabs of
sheet rock up, stapling a psychedelic poster to one, installing a
black light, covering his ratty mattress with a large hunk of
orange shag carpet left over from the Calvano mom's redecoration
of the TV room, and installing a bean bag chair. Bean bag chairs
had only been around for a year or so, but this one appeared far
older than its years, with several dozen strips of duct tape
covering several dozen rips and punctures. Duff wouldn't let us
hang out in the basement, but he was incredibly proud of his pad
and gave us a tour. We--Calvano, Picarillo, and me-- all decided
on the spot that when we were old enough to live in our
basements, we would fix them up exactly like this. "What
happened to the bean bag chair?" asked Picarillo.

"Got it from Mirshichenko's older brother.
Five bucks."

"Including the duct tape?"

Duff's eyes clouded over. "I'm gonna cover
it with some kind of a sheet. What happened, Mirshichenko's
brother went out behind the reservoir with it, and-- did you guys
all see "Bonnie and Clyde"?-- well, he had this idea
for a movie kind of like that. Only instead of having people shot
up in slow motion, he was gonna shoot up a bean bag chair. Well,
he was gonna have these two guys like carrying this bean bag
chair through the woods behind the reservoir, and then some guys
in rubber Nixon masks were gonna shoot them up, right? But all
the camera would show would be the bean bag chair being shot up,
in slow motion from like ten different angles, and then when the
bean bag chair was all shot up and the smoke was clearing the
screen would slowly fade to black and the sound track would play
"Strawberry Fields Forever" over the black screen and
then after the second time the song fades out, there would just
be this single title, "A Film by Jerry Mirshichenko".
"

"The movie would start out with these two
guys walking in the woods with the bean bag chair?" I asked.

"Yes."

"And we never find out anything about
them, why they've got the chair, what they're doing in the woods,
who the guys are who shoot them?"

"Yes, exactly."

"Cool."

Calvano and Picarillo also agreed it was cool.
We wanted to see the movie.

"No movie. Chenko's dad wouldn't let him
borrow the super 8 camera. So they just went into the woods and
shot up the chair anyway."

"Did they wear the Nixon masks when they
did it?" asked Picarillo.

"I think so, yeah."

"Cool."

"Yeah. It's like they made the movie
without making the movie, you know?"

We asked whether Jerry Mirshichenko made any
other movies. It sounded to us like Jerry Mirshichenko was an
authentic cinematic genius and we wanted to see all of his
movies.

"He did a screenplay I read," said
Duff. "The screen is white, except for a tiny black dot in
the center of the screen. You have this incredible macro zoom,
and the back dot turns out to be a white rat..."

"Wouldn't it be a white dot?"

"Nah. It would register black against a
really bright white background till you get real close. Then BAM!
The rat gets cut in half by a meat cleaver! But the eye barely
registers it, because on the action, we cut immediately to... A
close-up of somebody pouring cranberry juice into a glass. Fade
to black, while the sound track plays "A Day in the
Life.""

"He didn't make this one?"

"Nope."

"Did he cut the rat in half anyway?"

"That's really sick. You guys are a bunch
of mental cases sometimes, you know that?" He threw us out.
He was going to invite some girl to come over and check out his
pad and sit in the bean bag chair.

We went to the town park and snuck inside the
World War I tank memorial, which we sometimes used as a base of
operations when all our basements were off limits, and argued
about these two unmade movies by Jerry Mirshichenko. Calvano
argued that the bean bag movie had actually been made, it just
hadn't been permanently recorded. We all felt pretty relieved
that the rat movie had not been made. "I think it would be
okay if you used a very old rat," Picarillo said.

"No," I said, "common decency
would require the use of a stunt rat."

"My dad's got a super 8 camera," said
Picarillo. "We could make the bean bag movie."

"It would be a remake," said Calvano.

"No," said Picarillo. "It would
be a film recounting an actual event that took place just a few
weeks ago in the woods behind the reservoir!"

This seemed incredibly exciting. We decided to
use our own werewolf masks instead of purchasing Nixon masks to
keep the budget down, and Calvano suggested that we use the
actual bean bag chair in Duff's bachelor pad. "No need to
tell him. We'd have it back in a couple hours, and he'd never
notice a couple dozen more pieces of duct tape."

A few weeks later, while Duff was trying to
pick up the check out girl at the A & P, we grabbed the
chair, ran to the woods, put on our masks, set the chair atop a
small hillock, and cocked our toy machine guns. Picarillo took a
few cut-away shots of our gun barrels, our werewolf masks, our
out of focus fingers on our out of focus triggers. None of us
owned b-b guns, so we decided to simulate the withering assault
of our weapons with those shitty little firecrackers you used to
be able to buy from local hoods down by the laundry; we taped
about 200 of these all over the chair, twisted some of Duff's
extra fuse cord to the existing fuses(Duff's hobby--one of
them--was, um, making things blow up), and lit the end. Picarillo
wedged his camera into the crotch of a tree and hit the 'auto'
button. We danced in front of the chair in our werewolf masks,
firing our cap-machine guns at the bean bag chair. Some of the
fire crackers went off, and some of the fuse cord just burned,
and set the chair on fire. "Oh Cripes!" shouted
Calvano. We tried to beat out the fire, with some success; the
chair was only smoldering a little when it slid off the hillock.
One of the holes must have caught on something, because the chair
made a ripping noise and spilled its entire contents--beans?
buckshot?--into a gully which emptied into the reservoir.

We put the charred, empty husk of the bean bag
chair back in Duff's pad, with a note:

'Just needed to borrow some beans.'

(signed)

Sammy

"What the hell," cried Duff when he
saw all this, "Sammy? Who's Sammy? Where are the beans? What
do you little skanks think you're pulling here? Jesus, it's all
burned up and there's leaves and shit stuck all over it!"

"We swear on the souls of our mothers that
we don't have any idea what happened," said Calvano. Duff
didn't believe us.

He tried stuffing the thing with wads of
newspaper, but it was not aesthetically pleasing, and eventually
he put it out for the garbage men, who refused to take it.

FESTIVAL OF ROMANCE

"Even it this was a GOOD idea, which it
incidentally ain't, it would be STILL be a lousy idea," said
Chuck. He was placing pieces of stale pre-popped popcorn onto a
huge glue-coated sheet of oak tag paper. When he was done, there
was going to be a big heart made out of popcorn which we were
going to paint pink and hang in the lobby of the Park Theater.
The big pink popcorn heart was a lousy idea, too, but it wasn't
the lousy idea he was ranting about. THAT lousy idea was the
weeklong Valentine's Day Film Festival, which we were hosting
from February 8th through the 14th.

Generally we changed our bills twice a week;
this week, we were changing it daily, in the hope that our
love-befogged patrons would be returning to this festival of
romance every 24 hours. The owner of the theater had advertised
this magilla heavily-- fliers with the enormous headline
"THE 14 MOST ROMANTIC MOVIES OF ALL TIME!" could be
found in every barbershop window for, oh, just blocks and blocks.
And just in case our customers were planning to show up for only
one or two of our romantic double bills, there was the big pink
popcorn heart and the promotional gimmick it represented: any
patron who showed up at the box office with a piece of pink
popcorn would receive a fabulous one dollar discount! How could
all this fail to fill the ratty but still almost functional seats
of the Park Theater? Chuck finished placing the popcorn and I
turned the whole thing pink with a blast from my can of spray
paint. That was the last fun I was to have that week.

The 14 Most Romantic Movies of All Time were an
interesting assortment. Not one of them was advertised by name on
the promotional fliers, because when the fliers were run off
nobody knew what they were going to be. Our fearless owner felt
it made little difference-- "Whatever romantic movies happen
to be available at reasonable rates that week, THEY will be the
14 most romantic movies of all time." Chuck, the manager who
did most of the booking, made a list of what he felt were
appropriate movies, flipped through the catalogues of our usual
distributors, and tried to line up a respectable Festival of
Romance. The bill for the 8th of February was going to be
"Casablanca" and "A Man and a Woman," but the
owner over rode this ridiculous idea. "Boys! 'Casablanca' is
a WAR movie! It's got PETER LORRE in it! No war movies! No Peter
Lorre! Love, love, love! Kiss, kiss, kiss!" 'A Man and a
Woman' got the heave-ho because the asking price was insane,
i.e., commensurate with its popularity. Therefore our week of
romance was kicked off by those classic love stories "Kiss
Me Stupid" ("You can't go wrong with Dean Martin, boys.
To America, he is MISTER Valentine himself.") and, I swear,
"The Nun's Story" starring Audrey Hepburn, because,
boys, you can't go wrong with Audrey Hepburn. Unless you book
"The Nun's Story" on opening day of your festival of
Romance.

Somehow 14 movies were scheduled, some of which
should have brought in the lovebirds, and none of which did. By
day three ("Elvira Madigan" and "King
Kong"--"He really LOVES Fay Wray, boys, he really
does."), I was stationed outside the Theater with a huge
bucket of pink popcorn. I was supposed to pass this out to
pedestrians with the explanation that a single pink kernel would
entitle them to a dollar off at the box office, but nobody hung
around to hear my spiel. Most people ignored me. Kids grabbed
pink popcorn by the fistful, stuffed it into their mouths, and
then spit it out into the gutter-- like the big pink popcorn
heart, this stuff had acquired its rosy hue via spray paint and
was completely inedible. On day four ("Pillow Talk"
plus "Monkey Business"-- it was supposed to be the 1952
"Monkey Business" with Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe
("You can't go wrong with Cary Grant, boys..."), but
because of a screw up at the distributors, it was the 1931
"Monkey Business" with the Marx Brothers-- "He
really LOVES Thelma Todd, boys, he really does..."), I was
stationed outside with the bucket of pink popcorn, and now I was
wearing a pink gorilla suit. I have no idea why pink gorilla
suits should even exist, but believe me, they do. Where the
previous day I had been mercifully ignored by almost everyone,
today no one ignored me, and there was precious little mercy. And
just in case someone was inclined to mercy, I had a hand-lettered
sign affixed to my fuzzy pink chest which read: MEET PINKY THE
PINK VALENTINE GORILLA!

I had trouble seeing out through the eyeholes
in the pink gorilla head, so I'm not sure who stole my bucket of
popcorn. It couldn't have been one of our customers, because we
didn't have any. My head was supposed to fasten to the suit with
fabric straps that were stitched to the jaw line and tied to
metal loops in the shoulders. I didn't bother to tie the straps
to the loops, so I could periodically remove my head and cool
off. Seconds after my popcorn was stolen, however, someone pinned
my arms to my sides while a confederate turned my head backwards
and engaged the loops with impregnable granny knots. Then I was
spun around several times and released. Blind and with my head
pointing behind me, I knew I'd better get to the safety of the
theater, so I staggered towards what I hoped was the door, while
assorted townsfolk chortled merrily and said things like
"Look! Pinky the Pink Valentine Gorilla has been POSSESSED!
Call the Exorcist!" I stepped off the curb twice to the
accompaniment of screeching brakes and uproarious laughter.
Finally some kind soul offered to lead me into the theater. He
took my arm and began to walk with me. We crossed the street, and
then we crossed another street, and my rescuer said, "Hey
Pinky, I just want to introduce you to some friends of mine
before I bring you back to the movies, okay?" Whatever I
said must have been muffled by the gorilla head. I was soon
sitting on a barstool, still blind, a lit cigar stuck in my
gorilla mouth (located at the back of my head) while my new
friend recounted our totally spurious adventures to the other
people in the bar. I guess everyone dreams at some time or other
of bringing a pink gorilla with a backwards head into a bar, but
this guy had actually done it, so he can scarcely be blamed for
making the most of it. He dragged me to at least two other bars--
apparently if you bring a pink gorilla into a bar, you
automatically get free drinks--and finally Chuck showed up,
furious-- "We leave you on your own for ten minutes and
you're hitting the bars! This suit smells like a brewery! And,
for Christ's sake, your HEAD is on backwards!" The drunks
cried, "Hey, you leave our buddy Pinky the Pink Valentine
Gorilla alone!" but Chuck dragged me back to the theater
where my head was removed and repositioned, and I went back on
popcorn duty in my stinky pink gorilla suit. Later we sprayed the
suit with air freshener and deodorant to remove the smoke and
beer smells, but the result was not an improvement.

For years afterward Chuck told people the
Valentine Week Festival of Romance would have been a roaring
success if I hadn't gone on a toot in the pink gorilla costume,
but it wouldn't have been, and anyway I didn't. I just want to
set the record straight.

* * *

GROUND ZERO

I'd been thinking about getting a new hobby for
a while. My old hobby, which took up, oh, let's say 60% of my
time from the moment consciousness dawned until my 11th birthday,
was collecting rubber gaskets and insulators and pieces of rubber
gloves, and storing them in old cigar boxes. I had these things
catalogued according to texture, smell, and color; unidentifiable
CHUNKS of rubber (the size of the cheddar cheese cubes that get
mixed with the salsa and microwaved in that TV commercial) were
very highly prized, as were torn gloves with three or four
different layers of rubber(in different colors!)visible in cross
section. It was an extremely satisfying hobby, emotionally and
aesthetically, but one day my father noticed that I'd cut all the
rubber off my sneakers, and off my sister's sneakers, and I was
forced to give up my hobby.

"B-but, dad," I said, "a guy's
GOTTA have a hobby! I read an article about it! If you don't have
a hobby, you get dull an' boring an' you turn into a mental
case!"

To his credit, my father refrained from making
the obvious retort, which, however, I could read in the eloquent
(though involuntary) wiggling of his eyebrows.

"Well," he said after a while,
"You don't need this particular hobby. You should find
another hobby. You could collect coins, like your cousin
Glen." I repressed a snort of disgust; coins don't have much
of a kick for someone who's known the joys of collecting rubber
gaskets. "Or you could build something. Some guy in Kansas
built a replica of the Sphinx, exactly the same size, out of
bottle caps. In fact, his Sphinx is probably better than the
original one, because it's got a nose."

I don't know exactly how I hit on the idea of
digging a hole at Ground Zero; I was sort of adrift for a few
months after my gasket and glove collection was broken up, and I
spent a lot of time wandering aimlessly around, and one day I
happened to stumble across Ground Zero. Ground Zero was located
in the woods at the edge of my neighborhood. It was easy to get
to, if you were willing to push your way through some nasty
sticker bushes, but it was difficult to see; it was surrounded by
dense growth on all sides, including a maple tree infected with
some bizarre tree disease that manifested itself in large pointed
growths(exactly the size and shape of store-bought chocolate
chips, only green)on the leaves.

I had long wondered whether it would be
possible to dig a hole through the center of the earth. Now it
occurred to me that I could work undisturbed at Ground Zero; I
could dig a hole 50 or 100 feet deep (my modest estimate of how
much the average 10 year old could excavate in, say, five or six
hours, if the weather held up). So I waited for the ground to
soften, and on March 27th, it did. I was able to excavate nearly
7 inches of topsoil before hitting earth that was too hard for my
efforts. This took me about 45 minutes, though it seemed much
longer. It was getting dark. To make sure nobody found out what I
was doing, I filled in the hole and I returned home that day
happy, with every muscle aching.

As the weather grew steadily warmer and the
ground became softer, I was able to penetrate ever deeper into
the crust of the earth, and after three or four weeks, I had a
hole almost a foot deep at Ground Zero, which I scrupulously
filled in at the end of the day's work. That's how I spent the
rest of the spring-- I'd get home from school, finish my
homework, dig the hole, fill it in, go home. My life had a
purpose.

However, though I didn't realize it, my parents
were getting worried about me; I'd been skulking into the woods
every day with a shovel for months, and I wouldn't talk about it
(any more than I had talked about my gasket collection). One day
they sent my cousin Glen to follow me and find out what I was
doing. He reported--incorrectly, but understandably-- that I was
burying something in the woods. My father later told me the
debriefing went more or less like this:

Dad: Did you find any other holes?

Glen: Just the one he dug today.

Dad: Could you tell what he was burying?

Glen: I thought I saw a glimpse of a human
skull, but I'm not sure.

My parents now took the incredible step of
having the high school gym teacher (who apparently owed my Uncle
Tug a favor) dig up my hole, and when he found nothing, to watch
me and find out what I was doing. He was a more efficient
detective than Glen had been, and one night my parents (and Uncle
Tug, and Mr. Donnelli, the gym teacher) were waiting for me in
the living room when I returned home from Ground Zero.

"What," said my father, "is the
story with this hole you keep digging?"

"What hole?" I said.

"Cut it out," said Tug, "I got
pictures. We know about the hole."

"Well, it's just this hole I dig."

"Well, why?"

"Why what?"

"Why do you dig this same hole every day?
You dig this hole, and then you fill it in. Every day. My
sergeant made a guy in my unit do that 8 or 10 times in one day,
but at least he was burying and digging up a cigarette
lighter."

"What's the story? We just want to know
why you keep digging this hole."

"And we got pictures, so don't give us a
runaround."

"It's my hobby."

"Well, cut it out. It's nuts. You spend
all your time digging a hole and filling it in. That's not a
hobby."

"It's just this stupid thing you do every
day that takes up all your spare time and doesn't make any
sense."

"I thought that's what a hobby was."

"Well, it sort of is. But--"

"No. A hobby is..."

"Football," said Mr. Donnelli,
"that's a hobby."

"It's a sport," said my mother.

"It's also a hobby, and a great one. Also
golf."

"These are all sports."

"You can have a sport that's a hobby and a
hobby that's a sport. There's nothing wrong with that. It sure
beats digging a hole and then undigging it every day."

"Undigging?" said my mother.

"Horses," said Tug, "there's a
hobby for you."

"No!" cried my mother.

"How come I can't dig the hole?" I
said. "I like digging the hole."

"It's not so much that you like digging
holes, son. It's that you like digging the SAME hole. It makes us
worry about you."

"Did you hear," said Uncle Tug,
"some guy in Caldwell got in hock to the mob and they found
him in 57 garbage bags all over the Canadian north woods?"

"So what?" said my father.

"I'm just saying," said Tug.
"Look, I gotta go. Don't dig that hole every day anymore,
okay?"

"Can I dig it sometimes, once or twice a
week like?"

"Sure," said Uncle Tug, and he and
Mr. Donnelli left.

"What just happened here?" said my
father.

"I'm not sure," said my mother.

I continued to dig and undig my hole at odd
intervals for another 6 weeks or so, but now that everybody knew
what I was doing when I went into the woods with my shovel it
didn't seem like nearly as much fun, so I soon gave it up and
found other, less edifying hobbies.

GOOD BUDDY TOURS INC

I was working as an office temp in a room about
the size of a walk-in closet on the second floor of the Flatiron
Building. The company that had hired me was actually this guy who
had been in my class in high school and had started a Package
Tour Company. It was called Good Buddy Tours; the name alone
should have tipped me off that there was something amiss with the
operation. Then there was the fact that the office was being
illegally sublet from a company that was illegally subletting the
place from yet another company which may not have had clear title
to the property. And if that didn't start warning bells in my
head, the fact that I was hired as an office temp when I typed
fewer than 30 words a minute and had no other office-temp-type
skills at all should have given me some clue. Well, live and
learn.

At first, my job was to handle all the
correspondence that arrived. People would write to us, asking
about our rates for, say, a three-day bus tour of Manhattan for
40 people. I would say, "Ray, what are our rates?" and
he would say, "Let's see... three days... 40 people... can't
do it. No profit. Tell 'em we're overbooked." So I would.
The money did not exactly roll in, but this was not much of a
problem since overhead was light. My salary, for instance, came
to roughly no money per week. I would say, "Ray, the check
you gave me bounced," and he would say, "Screw up at
the bank. Hang in there, buddy. Lunch is on me today." Then
he would take me out to lunch, only he would leave his wallet at
the office and I'd pay for lunch. But we ate at really cheap
places, so it wasn't too bad.

This went on for two weeks, and then I said I
couldn't afford to work for him anymore, so he gave me a
promotion. "Hey, buddy. How would you like to be head
tour guide?"

"But we don't actually take people on
tours."

"All that is about to change, pal."
To my astonishment, it did. Less than a week after I was promoted
to head tour guide, our first busload of tourists arrived.
"Here's your chance to shine, buddy," said Ray.

"Don't I need some, I dunno, training or
something?"

"Nah."

"Aren't tour guides supposed to by
licensed by the city?"

"In theory," said Ray, "yes. In
practice, however, you don't have to worry about it."

"How come?"

"It's a matter of
Paaaaaauuuuggghhhh," He explained.

"Excuse me?"

"No problem." He took a drink of
water. "Frog in the throat. So. You all set to lead your
first tour?"

"And what's my salary for this?"

"Oh, excellent."

"I'm sure. But the amount?"

"I'd have to look it up. I believe it's
right around, oh, Paaaaauuuugghhhh." He took another drink
of water. "So you want to get some sleep tonight. Big day
tomorrow."

"Wait a minute. What's the
itinerary?"

"Oh, you know," he said, waving his
hand, "The usual. Standard itinerary."

"No, I don't know," I said,
"I've never done this before."

"I trust you, buddy," he said,
slapping my shoulder.

"I'd really like a peak at the
itinerary."

"Hey, you got it." He rummaged
through a desk drawer, found a pen and a memo pad. Seconds later,
he passed me a hand-written itinerary:

ITINERARY

DAY ONE

8:05: meet bus.

8:10: take bus to various places in Manhattan.

LUNCH

AFTER LUNCH: go to different places in
Manhattan.

LATER: take group back to hotel.

DAY TWO

see day one

As I read this over I could actually feel brain
cells shriveling within my skull. "Ray," I said, but he
cut me off.

"Don't feel bound by this. You're the head
tour guide. You're The Man. I have confidence in you. When you
greet the bus, make sure the guy in charge has a certified check
for the balance of the bill."

"Which hotel are they staying at?"

"Whichever one I can get the best rates
at. I'm gonna call around. And, listen, this is real important:
at some point, if you take the group to regular tourist-type
locations, there might be some guys from Consumer Affairs who ask
to see your license and photo ID."

"I don't HAVE a license and photo
ID."

"That's not important. What IS important
is, you don't tell them the NAME of the company, or the location
of this office. Otherwise there could be trouble. PROBABLY there
won't be any trouble. Definitely, no trouble. But just to be on
the safe side, no names, no locations. Knock 'em dead, buddy.
You're the MAN."

The next morning, having spent a night having
one dream after another in which I appeared in various public
locations without any pants, I stopped by the office for any last
minute instructions (the one I was hoping for was 'Forget the
whole thing.) and, incidentally, to find out where I was
supposed to meet the bus. Ray was showing the office to a guy in
a pin stripe suit.

"I dunno," the guy was saying,
"I was thinking about something a little bigger."

"Size isn't the thing here," Ray told
him. "What you do is, you SUBLET the place to somebody, and
use the money from that to rent a bigger place."

"Is it legal to do that without the
owner's permission?"

"My friend, you have my permission,
I swear," Ray said grandly. I interrupted and Ray told me
where the bus was going to be. "Listen," he said,
"I've been thinking about that possible contra-temps with
Consumer Affairs, so I picked up something for you that should
keep you out of trouble."

"You got me a license?"

"Better!" he said, and handed me a
fake stick-on mustache. "Now get out there and make me
proud. You are The MAN!"

I slapped the mustache in place and step forth
to begin my short but eventful career as a tour guide.

2

I was into my second month as the head tour
guide-- in fact, the only tour guide-- for Good Buddy Tours. The
office was located in the Flatiron Building, but each time I went
there, the office was smaller; the owner of the company, my
friend Ray, who was illegally subletting the office from a
financially strapped novelty company, was illegally subletting
chunks of the sublet to other struggling companies. The office
space was sliced up by movable cubicle walls, by slabs of
plywood, by the accordion pleated room dividers you may recall
from Sunday school. Some of Ray's illegal sublets were in turn
illegally subletting. It was like there was some bizarre contest
to see who could rent out the smallest possible fragment of
office space. My money was on Ray.

"Got a terrific tour lined up," Ray
told me as I came in. "63 people. You take 'em on 'The
Chinatown Adventure Tour'."

"Which is what exactly?"

"Whatever you want, buddy," said Ray,
shrugging his shoulders. "I leave it to you. Because you are
The Man. Gotta be in Chinatown. Show 'em around, take 'em on some
adventures. You know." I nodded stupidly. "Here's the
only thing: Keep an eye on everybody, because sometimes these
cats disappear into Chinatown. You know what I'm saying?"

"No."

"Well, apparently, a lot of Chinese
tourists go to Chinatown and never come out again. There's some
kind of trouble at home."

"These are Chinese tourists?"

"Is China the one with the big wall, or
the one with Godzilla?"

"The wall."

"Right. Well, you got to keep your eye on
everybody. Count heads. You take 63 in, you take 63 out."

"They're Chinese??"

"Did I say that? They are not. They
are..." He picked up a piece of paper from his desk.
"The Little Sisters of something. Some Spanish word with one
of those 's' shaped things on its side over the 'n'. It's
possible none of 'em speak English, which will make your job that
much easier."

"Oh?"

"You won't have to do any talking, right?
Anyway, pick up is at the P----- Hotel in--" he looked at
his watch-- "17 minutes. Get going. I'll call around and see
if I can get a bus or something to meet you there."

More than 17 minutes later (but not much more)
I arrived at the P----- Hotel, a notorious flea bag on the
Bowery. Ray often put up his tour groups there because the rates
were incredibly low, though not nearly low enough. I met my 63
charges-- Japanese nuns. I did not learn the name of their order;
they were getting on board a bus, but not one that Ray had
chartered. I had a brief chat with the sister in charge, who
spoke excellent English.

"We are going to a different hotel. We are
stopping payment on our check. Mr. Ray said we would stay in the
most beautiful hotel in the city. There was a hole in the wall of
my room, and someone stuffed empty beer cans through it. Mr. Ray
promised that we would meet John Denver and Kojack. We have been
in this terrible place for 3 days and we have not met
ANYBODY!"

"You've been here for 3 days?" I
said.

"Excuse me, we must go now." They
went. I returned to the Flatiron Building and briefed Ray on the
situation.

"Yeah," he said. "Well, I got
'em rooms at the P------, and then I figured I'd give 'em a few
days to get over the jet lag, you know? Instead of draggin' 'em
all over the place and wearin' 'em out. And are they grateful?
Buncha bums, pal, that's what it comes down to."

"Did you tell them they were going to meet
John Denver and Kojack?"

"Hey," he said, spreading his hands
in a helpless gesture, "I was calling around when you walked
in the door."

3

I picked up the phone. It was Ray, the owner
and president of Good Buddy Tours. I worked for them occasionally
as a tour guide, but we'd been having a minor disagreement
regarding back pay that was owed to me. I felt they should pay
it, they saw no reason why they should, since I did not own an
automatic weapon.

"Buddy," Ray said. I hung up. The
phone rang again and this time I let it ring 20 or 30 times while
I thumbed through my copy of 'An Historical Lexicon of Scurrilous
Invective,' one of the few truly indispensable volumes in any
library. I settled on a particularly hair raising rant from the
17th century (the golden age of scurrilous invective), lifted the
receiver, and read my selection in a clear voice.

"Phew," said Ray, when I finished.
"Wait, don't hang up. Listen--"

"Nope."

"I owe you money--"

"Yes, you do."

"I'm going to pay you!"

"No, you're not."

"I am! Don't hang up! I am! I am!
Today!"

"Where are you?"

"In a phone booth on 14th Street. I'm
about to board a bus and take some folks from... [sound of paper
rustling] some country that starts with an 'S,' it looks like...
on a tour of wineries in upstate New York. But I have your money,
and if you can get here before the bus takes off..."

I missed the rest of the sentence because I was
already out the door. I covered 5 blocks in less than a minute
and a half. The bus was just pulling away from the curb as I
raced around the corner of 14th Street. Fortunately 14th Street
has been undergoing repairs on a permanent basis since V-E Day
and I was able to trot alongside the bus as it crawled towards
the west side, pounding on the doors with my palms and shrieking
my own scurrilous invective until we stopped at a red light and
Ray opened the door.

"Hey, you made it, buddy."

"Money," I panted, hopping aboard.
Ray nodded, pulled a checkbook from his jacket. "Whoa! You
think I'd take a check from you? Do you think I'm insane? CASH.
CASH. CASH." The folks from the country that began with an
'S' watched our exchange silently, and with great attention.

"You hurt me when you say things like
that, buddy," said Ray. "But I'll have the driver stop
at the bank, and I'll cash the check."

"Where's the bank?"

"Uptown a ways," said Ray.
"Geez, you're wearing quite an outfit."

I was wearing cut-offs, sneakers with no socks,
a bright blue Hawaiian shirt with orange and chartreuse palm
trees. As usual. "So what?" I said.

Ray shrugged. A few moments later the bus
pulled into a 'No Standing' zone in front of a bank, Ray got out
("Back with the cash in a flash, buddy."), and I
waited. Then a wino stepped up to the door, unfolded an index
card, and said to the driver:

"You have to... to move this bust?"

"What?"

"Bust? Bus. This is a bus. You have to
move it. You are in a no... par-par-par..." He turned the
card over. "Oh. This is the part that comes first. Excuse
me. I am... an undercover policeman? You... [turns card over]
must move this burst. Bust. No par... parking!" He grinned,
happily folded up his index card, and stumbled away. The bus
driver obediently moved into traffic.

"I have a feeling that guy was no
cop," I said.

"Well, you know," said the driver,
though to tell the truth I didn't. The bus headed further and
further north, and I said, "Shouldn't you just circle the
block?"

"Nah." His radio buzzed. "It's
for you," he said to me.

"Buddy," said Ray. "Got a little
tied up. Listen, what do you know about upstate New York
wineries?"

"Aggazah," I choked.

"You there, pal? Listen, I need you to do
me a little favor. Just take these folks on a little, you know,
wine tasting tour. Hey, the check I was gonna cash, it's on the
bus. Look on my seat, under the book." There was the check.

"This is drawn on a bank in BUFFALO."

"Oh, is it? Well, good thing there's a
winery right around there so you don't have to go out of your
way. This is just a day or two, I swear."

"I don't know a thing about wineries. I
don't even know the itinerary!"

"Use the book."

"This is a phone book!"

"Right. All the wineries are at the end,
under 'W'. Just, you know, look for some good ones, and then call
them up when you get to a gas station or something. I have great
faith in your judgment. Or don't call them, you can just, you
know, show up and tell them the office screwed up the reservation
or something. You know how it goes."

"Stop this bus and let me off now," I
told the driver.

"Sorry, pal. Mr. Ray says if I do that,
he'll talk to the judge and get my parole revoked."

"This is kidnapping!"

There was a pause. "Your point being
what?"

I clicked the radio. "You still there,
Ray?"

"Yup. Hey, are we supposed to say 'over'
when we stop talking, or is that just in the movies?"

"I'm not doing this. OVER."

"Hey. Don't make me stop payment on that
check. Listen, you gotta do it. Those kids on the bus-- they're
all... you know... terminal cases. This is one of those 'last
wish' things. All those poor kids wanna do is drive through
upstate New York and hit a few wineries. So I should have cleared
it with you in advance. So sue me."

"I will."

"Go ahead, I deserve it. But don't break
those poor kids' hearts."

"Ray, there is nobody on this bus under
50."

Pause. "Maybe I'm thinking of the OTHER
bus. But the principle is EXACTLY the same. Anyway, I'll meet you
in Buffalo. We'll cash that check, and I'll pay you for THIS job
right on the spot."

"How much?"

He named a figure roughly three times the usual
amount.

"Well. If these folks want to stop at a
few wineries, I guess I can handle that..."

"You're THE MAN," said Ray. He signed
off. I caught my reflection in the windshield. 'All Day Sucker.'
I sighed.

"Okay," I told the driver. "Let
me introduce myself to the folks." He switched on the
intercom. "Good afternoon," I said. "I'm Jeff,
your guide. We'll be--" A woman in the back raised her hand.
"Yes Ma'am?"

"Excuse. Where Mr. Ray? Why you not wear
socks?"

"Never mind that," said another
woman. "What time we get to Las Vegas?"

THE RETURN OF GEORGE METETSKY

Spring had arrived, and we were scrunched up
inside the World War I tank memorial in the middle of the park
reading comic books, drinking Yoo Hoo, and slowly mummifying from
the heat. It must have been 150 degrees in the belly of the tank.
The hatches to the tank memorial had been soldered shut decades
earlier, but some enterprising young fellow with a chisel had
come along and taken care of that problem around the time we were
8 years old. For a few years, the tank was the used as a hang out
by the local teenagers, who left the inside of the tank littered
with soda cans, Coke bottles, magazines, and a lawn jockey that
had been stolen from Dr. Fergussen's front yard during one
particularly exciting Halloween.

When the tank had become too packed with
garbage for the teenagers, they abandoned it, and in due time it
became the base of operations for Calvano, Picarillo, and me. We
cleaned out the debris (not, of course, the lawn jockey, which we
named "George Metetsky") and Picarillo slapped a 75
cent padlock on the hatch, and we were all set. The belly of the
tank was a comfortable place to be, as long as the weather was
dry and the temperature was exactly 60 degrees in the sunlight;
any colder, and the tank was frigid; any warmer (and on this
particular day it was about 75 degrees outside), it was like a
blast furnace. Our bodily fluids were evaporating faster than we
could replenish them with Yoo Hoo, but we didn't care. For one
thing, it was our first visit to the tank in more than three
months. For another, we were incredibly stupid. "If we fall
asleep," Calvano said, "We'll dry out like three sticks
of beef jerky. We'll cook so fast we won't even stink. They'll
never find our bodies, not ever. We'll be perfectly preserved in
the tank for 5 thousand years. Some future archaeologists will
dig up the tank and find us. They'll call us The People of the
Tank. They'll have pictures of our miraculously preserved corpses
in LIFE magazine."

"How will they know we're here?"

"They won't. They'll probably be looking
for something else."

"Probably for George Metetsky," said
Picarillo. "I know Dr. Fergussen is still looking. My mom
said he was in the supermarket just a week or two ago, and he was
saying, 'If I ever catch the bums who took my lawn jockey,
they'll be hell to pay.'"

"Yeah, that's right, Picarillo. In 5000
years, archaeologists will still be looking for Dr. Fergussen's
lawn jockey."

"He's offering 20 bucks for it, no
questions asked."

"Well, there you go. 5000 years from now,
some guy with a head shaped like a light bulb will crack open the
tank, see Metetsky, and yell, "Hey, guys! I found Dr.
Fergussen's lawn jockey! We just made 20 bucks! Wah-hoo!"
(It was general knowledge among intelligent 12 year olds in 1966
that in the future, EVERYBODY would be incredibly smart and have
enormous brains which would be housed in enormous skulls shaped
like light bulbs. Also they would be bald (ladies too) and there
would be big veins all over the scalp).

"Now you're being sarcastic," said
Picarillo. "But I still don't see why the tank will be
underground."

Calvano began banging his head on the wall of
the tank. "That (BONK!) will probably (BONK!) be the assump
(BONK!) tion, yes (BONK!)."

"Wow. Cool. Maybe we should wear helmets
when we come here, just in case."

Calvano didn't answer, though he also didn't
stop banging his head against the tank wall.

"You know," Picarillo continued,
"I read this article in READERS' DIGEST? About quicksand? It
said that quicksand was just regular dirt, but it became
quicksand because of the way that water was flowing under it.
This scientist guy diverted a stream under this pasture, and if
he had the water going under at most angles, all he got was a
muddy pasture, but if the water was going in a certain way, the
mud had negative buoyancy, and it was quicksand."

Calvano stopped bonking. "We gotta get
this article! You mean if we, like, stuck a garden hose in the
ground at a certain angle under the tank, and turned on the
water, the ground would turn to quicksand and the tank would
sink?"

"Yup," said Picarillo.

"And then if we turned the water off, the
quicksand would turn back to regular dirt? And no one would ever
in a million years be able to figure out what happened to the
tank?"

"Not unless they read the article,"
said Picarillo.

"What month was it? We could go to the
library and RIP OUT the article, and then nobody would have a
clue!"

"Well, wait a minute," said
Picarillo. "First we gotta get the helmets."

"What helmets?"

"For US. So they think we're soldier
guys."

"Who?"

"The FUTURE GUYS, with the HEADS."

"Are you out of your mind? Picarillo,
we're not supposed to be IN the tank when it sinks. That would
kill us, Picarillo. We would be dead."

"Well... probably they could revive us,
5000 years from now. They've got Walt Disney's brain packed in
dry ice in a secret cavern under Disneyland, waiting for a cancer
cure. Fact."

Suddenly we heard someone approaching the tank.
We became silent, except for the noise of our bodies shriveling
in the heat.

"Bruce, there's someone trapped inside the
tank," said a woman. "I heard him tapping out a
message. 'Bonk...bonk...bonk.'"

"You're crazy from the heat, Margie,"
Bruce said with what we assumed was admiration. "Nobody's
been inside that tank in 50 years."

"Darn it, Bruce, I'm telling you..."

"HEY! ANYBODY IN THERE!?" Bruce
yelled into the barrel of the tank. "See? Nobody
there."

"I'm going to look in this hole,"
said Margie. Margie looked through one of the ventilation holes.
If we had been perfectly still, we would have been as good as
invisible in the gloom of the tank, but Picarillo decided to take
no chances, and blocked the hole. He blocked it with the face of
George Metetsky, the lawn jockey. Margie screamed.

"What the hell...? Hey, that's that
goddamn plaster coon Dr. Fergussen's been looking for!" said
Bruce. "He's been shitting up the town with fliers about
that thing for three years. He's offering 20 or 30 bucks! I'm
gonna get my chisel and bust it out!"

"Bruce, HE WAS BONKING TO US!" Margie
cried, as they trotted out of the park. We slipped out as soon as
we dared, but stupidly left Metetsky behind. It didn't occur to
us to take the lawn jockey and score the reward for ourselves.

"Take the lock," said Calvano.
"That moron is coming back with a chisel and he'll just bust
it off if you leave it on." We dropped from the hatch onto
the cool grass, and the sweat boiled off our faces.

George Metetsky was back at work holding his
lantern high outside the Fergussens' front door within a couple
of days, and Bruce was presumably 20 dollars richer. Metetsky
vanished a couple of years later, the victim of a younger
generation of vandals, never to be seen again.

Our quicksand experiments (which we carried out
relentlessly over the spring and summer of 1966) were
unsuccessful, and the tank still sits on the surface of the
earth, where future archaeologists will never think to look for
it.

WING-DING AT UNCLE TUG'S

My mother was baking one of those weird holiday
mixes made up of various nuts, little pretzels, and what I used
to think of as the "plaid" family of breakfast cereals
(Wheat Chex, Rice Chex, etc) when Uncle Tug walked into the
kitchen. He kicked the snow off his shoes and said, "I need
one of those things." His hands described a shape in
the air, but so quickly that he might have been demonstrating how
to tie a clove hitch without a rope.

"What things?" asked my mother.

"I don't know what you call it,
but..." he repeated his hand motions, which were just as
cryptic this time.

My mother slid a pan of mix into the oven.
"What does it do?"

"You hold it over the steak," said
Tug, "and you turn the top part, and pepper comes out."

After Tug left, I asked my mother when Uncle
Tug's party was going to be. As far as I could recall, Uncle Tug
had never held an INSIDE party before, just outdoor barbecues.
They were always great. One year he couldn't get the charcoal to
burn-- because the charcoal had been removed from the bag and
replaced by black rocks, though that's another story-- actually,
they were regular gray-type rocks, but they had been painted
black-- so he served the hot dogs raw. "It's EXACTLY the
same thing as baloney," he explained, "and who the hell
heats up baloney? It's perfectly safe, this is the way they eat
it in England."

"Who says?" asked my father.

"It's COMMON KNOWLEDGE. They serve
everything cold over there. Not cold-cold, but room temperature.
They serve the BEER at room temperature."

"My isn't this a perfectly lovely
afternoon," said my mother, picking up a cold (or warm) dog
and tossing it over her shoulder. It cleared Tug's fence and
landed in the neighbor's swimming pool. Within thirty seconds,
approximately two dozen hot dogs were floating in or drifting to
the bottom of the neighbor's pool. Now that was a barbecue. So I
was understandably eager to see what Tug would do with an actual
indoor sit-down party.

"He didn't say when it was going to
be," said my mother, "and I'm not 100% sure that I want
to go to a party where Tug has access to a pepper mill."

For the next week I ran to the mail box as soon
as the postman arrived, searching for Tug's invitation. I
badgered my parents relentlessly. "Call him up," I
begged, "otherwise he might forget to invite us!"

"Now wouldn't that be a tragedy,"
said my father.

One night we heard police sirens some streets
distant. "Must be Tug's party," said my mother. My
father snorted appreciatively.

So the next day I took it upon my self to
contact Uncle Tug.

"Mom and dad are waiting to get the
invitation to the big party," I told him.

"What time is it?" he said.

"I don't know. It's YOUR party!"

"No, I mean now? My clock ain't working.
Oh, my head."

"Are you gonna invite us, Uncle Tug?"

"Sure, sure. Who is this?" The
conversation continued in this manner for a while and when I hung
up the phone I was far from reassured that an invitation would be
forthcoming.

But a few days later, an envelope with Tug's
return address appeared in our mail box, and in the envelope was
the invitation I had been waiting for:

YOU ARE INVITED

TO

A WING-DING & [something blacked out]

AT

TUG POROWSKY'S

ON [something blacked out] DEC. 16th(this
date handwritten)

FROM 8 PM until ????

WITH LIVE ENTERTAINMENT
PROVIDED BY MISS [something blacked out]

By holding the card up to the light, I could
read the date he had blacked out (which happened to be,
coincidentally, the night we'd heard all those police sirens),
but the other cross outs had been done more expertly; I could
make nothing of them.

"What kind of entertainment do you think
he's gonna have?" I asked.

My father opened his mouth and my mother
immediately said, "We have no idea."

"Do I have to wear school clothes?"

"I'll call Tug and see how formal it
is," my mother said. When she got off the phone, there were
deep lines in her forehead. "He asked me if I had a pepper
mill he could borrow."

Any doubts that Tug had already thrown at least
one wing-ding prior to the 16th were dispelled when we arrived;
greasy paper bags from various take-out places had been swept---
or more likely, kicked-- into the corners of the living room, and
much debris poked out from under the sofa. My mother's pepper
mill sat on a folding table. She examined it. "Tug, did you
put CHEESE in here?"

"Wasn't me," he said. "Everybody
sit down, the show's about to start." The entertainment Tug
had provided was first class: it was the annual Andy Williams
Christmas Special. "This guy is a real pro," said Tug,
approvingly. As we settled ourselves onto the couch, Tug brought
out the munchies: a bowl of pretzels. Interestingly, none of the
pretzels was unbroken, and some had dried dip on them.

"Quite a wing-ding," said my father.

"You heard about it? Oh, I mean,
yeah," said Tug. My sister found a strange object under her
cushion: a round piece of glitter-coated fabric about the size of
a half dollar, with a tassel attached to the center.

"This has got to be a joke," said my
father as Tug retreated to the kitchen to see if he could find
some clean glasses. "He's going to bring out the real food
in a few minutes." He didn't; he didn't come out of the
kitchen. We waited through two commercial breaks, and then my
father went in. "Wake up, Tug," we heard. Tug came out
and watched the rest of Andy's special with us. When it was over,
he told us he was glad we could come and we should do this again
next year. As we numbly put on our coats, he handed the pepper
mill to my mother.

"Annie, could you do me a favor?" he
said. "I borrowed this from somebody-- I don't remember
who-- and I can't get the cheese out, and they're gonna be honked
when they find out. Could you take this home and see if you can
get it cleaned up?"

BEARHEADS

In my neighborhood there was a creek of such
insignificance that it had no name. It emerged from the ground on
the far side of Lindsay Road, wound through a couple dozen
backyards, and emptied into the Peckman River. Calvano and I
spent Saturday mornings hunting crayfish in the creek. The banks
were densely shaded by trees that had contracted strange tree
diseases; oak leaves were coated with strange lumps and blisters,
maple leaves developed odd protrusions that came to a point and
looked exactly like chocolate chips right out of the bag, except
for the color. Lots of gross little animals lived in the mud by
the creek, but you had to know where to look and you had to be
patient. You could find box turtles, salamanders, garter snakes.
We wanted crayfish. They looked like tiny lobsters. Calvano had a
vague idea about catching 20 or 30, gluing tiny plastic army
helmets on their heads, and inciting incredible crayfish battles.
"There's no reason they can't hold little spears and
stuff," he said, "And the most intelligent crayfish can
probably be trained to wield miniature axes made from razor
blades--or so science tells us."

We had collected 5 or 6 miserable looking
specimens in an old coffee can with rocks and mud at the bottom
when we were distracted by some noises at the nearby Wilhorsky
residence. "I want this crap OUTTA here!" Mr. Wilhorsky
was saying, and suddenly a bear head came flying out the back
window.

"That cost 15 bucks!" screamed Mr.
Wilhorsky's 19 year old son, Little Steve. Mr. Wilhorsky was Big
Steve. The bear head rolled down the slope of the Wilhorsky's
backyard and into some bushes. Calvano dove through the brush and
curled himself around the head like a lineman falling on a muffed
punt. Big Steve and Little Steve continued bellowing while
Calvano slid down the banks of the creek. "I can't believe
this! This is the greatest thing that's ever happened to me! Look
at this!"

The bear head was a mess. The hair was matted,
the glass eyes were too big for the sockets, many of the teeth
were missing, and worst of all, a large round (but not exactly
round) spot had been shaved on the top of the bear's head, and
written on the bald spot in what appeared to be indelible Magic
Marker was:

CAN'T "BEAR"

TO LOOK AT

YOUR OLD CAR?

Undoubtedly the rest of the message was printed
on the top of another bear head. "How many bear heads do you
think he's gonna throw out the window?" I whispered.

"At least seven," said Calvano with
remarkable confidence.

"I want every single one of these things
out of the house by lunch time," Big Steve told Little
Steve. We couldn't make out the rest of the conversation. Soon it
became obvious that no more heads were coming out the window. We
took the bear head and the crayfish container back to Calvano's
house. We were going to hide the bear head in Calvano's room, but
Calvano's brother Duff saw us sneaking up the stairs and swiped
the head and gave Calvano Indian Burns until Calvano told him
where the head came from. "The bear heads are mine,"
said Duff. "If they dump any stupid animals like mooses and
deer, you can have those, but only if you help me get the bear
heads. And any other cool stuff with fangs."

"You gotta help us find a source of gamma
radiation so we can mutate the crayfish," said Calvano.

"Sure thing, you moron," Duff said
amiably. "Let's go skulk in the bushes by Wilhorsky's and
see what's what."

"He won't be laughing when we develop a
breed of mutant crayfish with opposable thumbs," Calvano
said.

Little Steve was loading his animal heads in
the back of his dad's pick-up truck. A little way up stream, Mrs.
Perelli's washing machine was sending its suds through a pipe in
the basement that emptied into the creek. A huge mound of white
suds flowed past us. "You think that kind of stuff bothers
the crayfish?" Calvano said.

"No, you moron, they DIG it," said
Duff. "Run up to Mrs. Perelli's house and ask to use the
phone and call Little Steve. Say anything you want, but keep him
on the phone for at least ten minutes. That should be long enough
for me and your moron friend to abscond with the heads."

Calvano scrambled up the Hill to Mrs.
Perelli's. When the phone rang and Little Steve went in the house
to answer it, Duff and I raced for the truck. Two more bear
heads, a moose head, some deer heads--all in horrible shape,
smelly, disgusting, incredibly desirable. Little Steve must have
seen us through the window. We heard his scream of rage. Duff
grabbed a bear, I grabbed the moose, we ran for the woods as
Little Steve boiled out of the house.

"You little shits!" hollered Little
Steve, "Come back with those heads! I'll track you down and
kill you both! You'll die like dogs!"

"Come and get us, you moron!" Duff
called over his shoulder. But Little Steve didn't hunt us down
and kill us. He gathered up all the heads we hadn't been able to
get away with and drove them to the dump. I nailed my moose head
to my bedroom wall. Then my father drove it to the dump and threw
it away. The Calvano bear heads also ended up at the dump. For
three or four weeks, kids would raid the dump in gangs and fight
over the heads with the secret messages printed on the tops, but
eventually the heads got too ratty and smelly even for us.
Calvano was broken hearted. We went back to the crayfish war game
project but all our crayfish were too stupid to master even the
simple weapons we made for them. "I had high hopes for that
summer," Calvano said many years later.

THE SWITCH

Early one morning last week I answered a knock
on my door, and found one of my nice upstairs neighbors turning
the oil burner switch (located right outside my apartment) on.
"I was going to ask if you had any hot water this
morning," she said, "because I didnt. I took a
shower in cold water. And then I saw the oil burner switch was
off. Who would do that?" I didnt know (and still
dont), and we both shook our heads about this world where
people went around shutting off other peoples oil burners,
and I waited a good hour or so before I took my shower. But the
situation reminded me of something for the first time in decades.
This was not, I realized, the first time some nut case had shut
off my oil burner. And that time, the nut case happened to have
been me. But I didnt want to shut off the oil burner; I was
trying to blow up the house.

I was about seven, and I had seen "The
Bride of Frankenstein" so many times on TV that every frame
was burned indelibly into my brain. I had seen all of the
Universal Frankenstein movies and I loved them all, but
"Bride" was my favorite by far. I am delighted to say
that I have seen the movie recently and it stands up very well,
unlike many of my childhood favorites, most of which concerned
giant insects or lizards running amuck in the desert.
"Bride" has a lot off great scenes, but the one that
made the biggest impression on me was the climax. Dr.
Frankenstein and his insane colleague, Dr. Pretorius, have just
created a female monster (actually shes pretty cute, with a
dynamite hair cut), a mate for the Frankenstein Monster in their
tower laboratory. But the Bride takes one look at the prospective
groom and starts screaming, and the heartbroken monster walks
over to the wall and reaches for a switch. "Dont touch
that lever!" cries Dr. Pretorius, "youll blow us
all to atoms!" A few seconds later the monster pulls the
fatal lever, and the tower blows up, in spectacular fashion.

The great thing about that scene is that
switch. Not only is it never explained why that switch is there
(WHY would anybody want to have a lever that blows up the
place?), until the monster reaches for it, there is not even a
hint that such a thing exists-- theres no foreshadowing, no
scene where Fritz stumbles around the lab and somebody says
"Watch out, Fritz, or youll bump into that LEVER,
WHICH IF PULLED BLOWS UP THE BUILDING!" and certainly no
scene where anyone says "Just in case we want to blow up the
tower, wed better install a special tower-blowing-up
switch." Its just there, as easy to grab as the
thermostat.

Possibly because the existence of the switch is
announced and accepted so casually, I never for a second found
myself wondering what on earth it was doing there. Instead I
simply assumed that it was standard equipment. At least for a
tower lab.

One afternoon I discussed this with my friend
Mitch, who, a year or so younger than I, was even more convinced
that such switches were to be found in buildings. And not just
tower labs, either; Mitch was certain he had seen such a switch
in his house. I was staggered. I had seen no such switch in my
house, and it didnt seem fair that Mitch should have a
blow up switch when I did not.

"You probly do," said Mitch.
"You just arent looking in the right place."

So with Mitch in tow, I set about looking for
the switch that would blow my house to atoms. The first place we
checked was the attic. This seemed logical, since in
"Bride" the switch was located at the top of the
structure, but we found nothing remotely resembling a lever. Next
we checked the basement, and immediately focused out attention on
the fuse box. The fuses themselves seemed promising, and vaguely
suggestive of explosives-- we thought they looked like little
sticks of dynamite-- but we could see no lever. The master switch
would have done nicely, but that was in a companion box a few
inches away, and that was wisely locked up with a padlock. We
were both certainly the blow-up switch must be located in that
box, and were to say the least disappointed that we couldnt
get at it. We started up the stairs, and there, mounted on the
wall just before the door to the breezeway, was THE SWITCH! It
had to be, because it was painted bright red, and there was a
little sign screwed into the fixture, which said Do Not
Touch.

"Thats gotta be it," I said.
"Is that what the one at your house looks like?"

"The one at MY house looks just like the
one inna movie," said Mitch somewhat snottily. (Years later
he admitted he had been lying, and his house was not, in fact,
equipped with a blow-up switch).

"Well, lets check it out," I
said. Naturally, we did not want to get stuck in an exploding
house, though, so we opened the door to the breeze way and
cleared some tied- up newspapers out of the way (this was years
before recycling, so I have no idea what they were doing there),
and got ready to throw the switch. First, Im proud to say,
I checked the house to make sure nobody was home, even going to
far as to check my sisters room; I must have been vaguely
aware that there would be the devil to pay if I blew up the house
while my sister was inside. Then we went back into the stairwell
to the basement, braced ourselves for a mad dash out the
breezeway, and I threw the switch. "RUN!" I cried.

We sprinted as quickly as we could across the
street and into an overgrown tract called Fergussens Lot.
We took cover behind a tree stump and waited for the house to
blow. After about 15 minutes (or more likely, about three), we
decided it wasn't going to explode after all ("Maybe
its busted," Mitch suggested), and we wandered away.

About 8 PM that evening my dad noticed it was
getting very chilly in the house, and checked the oil burner
switch, noted it was off, flipped it on, and questioned me. Like
all guilty people, I was quite resentful that someone dared
suspect me. "I didnt know it was the oil burner,"
I said. "I thought it would blow up the house." I
explained about "The Bride of Frankenstein" and The
Switch.

"So let me see if I understand you. You
thought if you pulled the switch you wouldnt turn off the
oil burner, you would blow up the house?"

"Yes."

"So you pulled it?"

"Yeah. But nothing
happened," I said with palpable
disappointment.

"But you thought it would?
Didnt you figure youd get blown up
when the house blew?"

"No," I said,
"In the movie, the tower like SHAKES and
stuff for a few minutes before it blows."

My father was very silent for a moment, and
then said, "Well, youre lucky you didnt find
switch. That movie was made almost 30 years ago. Back then, they
had much more primitive switches. Nowadays you pull the switch,
and the place just goes BAM! Just like that." He snapped his
fingers.

"Geez!" I said.

"Just for the record, where did you figure
we were going to live after the house blew up?"

"Huh," I said. This was another
factor I hadnt considered: once the house was blown up, we
couldnt live there anymore. "What about that hotel we
passed in Atlantic City? The one shaped like an Elephant?"

"Ah. The Elephant Motel." He appeared
to be thinking about it. "Well, maybe," he said at
last.

NEWS YEARS EVE WITH MUSHROOMS

"I got us invited to a New Year's Eve
party," said my friend Barry. "Lots of girls gonna be
there."

"Hang on one second," I said, and I
put down the phone and quickly tightened the cap on the soda
bottle I had been drinking from. I slammed the bottle onto the
kitchen counter. It was a 32-oz bottle, and I flattened around
40% of the cockroaches that had been doing a hoochie-koochie
dance on the remains of last night's attempted meat loaf. A year
earlier I couldn't have done it, but now soda came in plastic
bottles. O Brave New World!

"...only thing is," Barry was saying
when I retrieved the phone, he having as usual completely ignored
my request to hang on, "the neighborhood is really kinda
bad. 13th Street and Avenue C..."

"Yow," I said. I was on 10th
St. and Avenue A, which was about a minute and a half from the
site of the party, and 99.9% of the world's population would
figure I was in the same neighborhood, but I was not in the sane
.1 % who realized that three blocks north and 2 blocks east it
was a whole different world. The surviving cockroaches in my
apartment were still hiding out; on 13th Street, they
would have wrestled the soda bottle out of my hands and stuffed
me inside it. Or vice versa. It was a tough neighborhood. About 4
years earlier I had been at the infamous 'Puerto Rican-Canadian
Unity Day' debacle, when my friend Sam Konkin (Canadian) had held
a party in his 13th St. apartment, to which he invited
the neighborhood (Puerto Rican), via a large banner hung out of
his window proclaiming 'PUERTO RICAN- CANADIAN UNITY DAY--FREE
BEER.' The neighborhood did not attend, but a passing motor cycle
gang (ethnic heritage unknown-- in fact, I'm not 100% sure about
the species) did. We escaped to the roof next door via
Sam's bathroom window. The gang would have followed us, but they
were all too fat to fit through the window. They smashed all of
Sams furniture into throwable fragments and threw them at
us but they were so drunk they hardly ever hit us. Still, I
wasn't real anxious to revisit the scene.

However, there were going to be lots of
girls...

"...and Yvette says we should bring our
guitars."

Well, that settled that. During this phase of
my life (to be covered in Vol. 3 of my autobiography,
"Grimshaw: The Grotesquely Stupid Years") I never
passed up an opportunity to play the guitar and sing at a party,
especially when Barry, my some-time songwriting partner, was also
going to play the guitar and sing. I wasn't exactly good, but
Barry was really terrible, so I figured I would sound like Django
Reinhart in comparison. This was one of my many misfigurings
during that halcyon age.

Around 10 PM on the big night-- unseasonably
warm for midwinter-- Barry stopped by my apartment, I tuned both
of our guitars, and we walked to the party, which was on the 6th
floor of a six-story walk-up. There were about 25 or 30 people on
hand. I didn't know anybody, and Barry only knew a couple of
people. We mingled, we ate crackers, we tried to talk to girls.
At some point we took out our guitars, and people began
requesting songs, none of which we knew. "We write our own
material," said Barry, and all interest in us immediately
died. It was like we had suddenly become transparent. While Barry
strummed aimlessly, I told the story of Puerto Rican-Canadian
Unity Day, figuring it would go over pretty well, as it had
occurred on this very block. A couple or three people who
were unable to get away from us because of the crowding listened
to the story, including our hostess, Yvette, who was attractive,
and her room mate, Terry, who was downright pretty. "That's
such a cool story," said Terry. "Hey-- it's too crowded
in here to hear your cool songs. That story gives me an idea. Why
don't we go up on the roof?"

"It's kinda chilly," said Barry. I
stomped on his foot.

"Great idea," I said.

"Yeah!" said Yvette. "We might
even be able to see the ball drop on Times Square from
there."

"I'll get a couple of cans of beer,"
said Terry.

So the four of us wormed our way to the door of
the apartment and out into the hall, and from there to the little
stairwell that accessed the roof. It was chilly, but not
uncomfortable. "Look," said Yvette, "Times
Square!"

"Wow, can we really see it?"

"Look!"

"I think that's the clock tower in Union
Square," I said.

"I think so, too," said Barry.

When we turned around, we were alone, and the
door was locked. We could hear giggling on the other side. Which
grew fainter and fainter.

"They'll come back in a couple of
minutes," I said. "They probably went to get some, uh,
chips or something. Look--" I pointed to a paper bag.
"They left the beer."

Barry looked inside the bag. "Hey-- these
are cans of mushroom gravy!"

Somehow the idea that they had left us on the
roof with cans of mushroom gravy made the situation seem far
crueler than if they'd just left us on the roof with nothing at
all. We stomped on the roof from time to time but it didn't
disturb the party, which got very loud somewhere around midnight.
We figured they would surely come back for us once it was
officially the New Year. They did not. At one point Barry
screamed incoherently for about 10 minutes, but that sort of
thing was pretty common on East 13th Street and it
attracted no attention. I hunkered down near a heat duct and got
some sleep. I came awake when I heard the unmistakable sound of a
beer can tab being popped. "MUSHROOM GRAVY?!" I yelled,
and hurled myself across the roof at Barry. The open can spun
away, it's contents briefly describing a foamy arc against the
East Village sky.

"I was afraid if you knew it was beer
you'd drink yourself into a stupor and freeze to death,"
Barry said. I tried to wrestle the bag with the remaining can
from him. It bounced off the roof and landed in the back of a
pick-up truck parked at the curb. We stared at each other. At
some point we fell asleep. We woke up sometime after dawn, when
the truck started up. We hung over the side of the roof and
watched our beer roll down the street, in the direction of the
FDR Drive. "Happy New Year," said Barry.

I don't remember when or how we got off the
roof, but we aren't there any more, so I'm sure we did.

NEW YEARS EVE WITHOUT
MUSHROOMS BUT WITH LOTS OF OTHER STUFF

People are sometimes amazed when I tell them
that I lived and worked in New York City for something like 10
years, that I often walked from my job on 50th Street to my
apartment in the East Village well after 11 at night, and was
never mugged or even accosted, that I never encountered anything
dangerous on the subways, and that, aside from a few annoying
burglaries(committed against, not by me), I pretty much had a
wonderful time. "But," I am asked, "What about the
criminals, the crazies, the psychos, the junkies, the maniacs?
Didn't you ever see them?"

And I answer, "Yes, as a matter of fact, I
saw every single one of them. In one night. What happened was
this..."

2

A couple days after Christmas, the owner of the
theatre chain I worked for called together all of his managers
and assistant managers and told us that we were going to be
massacred. He didn't put it quite that way, but that was the gist
of it. "You boys ever seen what it looks like out
there--" he waved his hand in the general direction of Times
Square, where all but two of his theaters were located-- "On
New Year's Eve? When the big ball comes down? There's a quarter
million people out there, maybe half a million, and what do they
do once the ball's down?"

"They run amuck," said Lee King, who
managed the Embassy Triplex.

"I was going to say they don't do nothing,
but it comes to the same thing," said the owner, Mr. Terry
"Bergen" Belson, "Because they got nothing to do.
Sure, they go to parties or clubs or they go home and get a
snootful, those of them which have not started out with a
snootful already. But what I'm getting at is, one minute to
twelve, you got half a million people here, and ten minutes later
you got 50 garbage men on triple overtime sweeping up confetti.
Why don't they stay in Times Square? Because there's nothing
going on here after midnight. What's the last show we got
running? The 11:10 show at the Victoria, which gets out at 12:40.
All you other guys are shut down by 11:30. But YOU--" he
pointed to King-- "seat 1600 people, the Victoria seats 420,
the Forum seats 410, or it would if McClosky would get that
busted seat in the balcony fixed as he was supposed to do a week
ago, and the Embassy # 1 holds 300. My point is, half a million
people are here, don't you think some of 'em might want to relax
at a good movie after blowing off steam in Times Square on New
Year's Eve? That maybe one person out of every 200 might want to
watch one of these excellent first run features?"

The answer to this question was obviously, 'No,
we think it's very likely that not a single person in Times
Square on New Year's Eve wants to see a movie, they want to get
drunk and go on a rampage.' But just as obviously, it was not the
answer Mr. Belson wanted to hear, so we were all silent.

"Midnight shows, fellows. We're going to
make history. We'll put some extra ushers on, and we'll have you
boys from the Guild 50th and the 72nd Street on hand too, just in
case things get a little rowdy." I was the assistant manager
of the Guild, and I wanted at this point to say something like 'A
little rowdy? On New Year's Eve? In Time Square? Why ever would
you think such a thing?', but I kept silent.

For the next few days, all of us were in sort
of the same situation as a man falling off the side of a 50
mile-high mountain; we could see what was coming, and we could
see when, but there was absolutely nothing to do about it except
wonder from time to time just how loud the splat would be. The
manager of the Forum, Mr. McClosky, dealt with it by locking
himself in his office the next morning and quickly drinking
himself into a stupor that lasted until January 2nd; Mr. Baker,
manager of the Victoria, which was the theatre closest to the
actual intersection of Broadway and 42nd Street and hence the one
that would suffer the most damage in the shortest amount of time,
showed a little more originality. "My God, I'm blind, I
can't see, I have hysterical blindness," he cried a couple
of days later, stumbling out into the lobby with his arms in
front of him like Bela Lugosi in "Frankenstein Meets the
Wolfman." His vision returned 8 hours into the New Year, but
on the Big Night, the Victoria was managed by a substitute from
the Guild 50th, i.e., me.

3

The crowds had been milling around Times Square
for hours and we had been doing excellent business all night,
since you could not come in and use the bathroom unless you
bought a ticket, and everybody in the crowd needed to use the
bathroom. Unfortunately, many of the them were not using it for
the usual reasons, they were using it to-- how shall I put it?--
make like Linda Blair in everybody's favorite scene from the
Exorcist. The ushers were very busy with the mops that night, and
not happy about it; and when I went in to wash my hands around
10:30 and found somebody Worshipping the Porcelain God, I said,
"C'mon! You don't have to pay 5 bucks to do that in here,
you can do that out in the alley for free!"

"What *blurp* do you think I *wwwuuugghhh*
am? A pig?"

Things got very hectic in the final hour before
midnight; two of my five ushers quit, and the other theaters
refused to send reinforcements; someone threw a bottle through
the screen, though the hole was small and only noticeable during
close-ups; a seemingly endless stream of drunks attempted to get
in through the exit doors; someone emptied a garbage can--not a
waste basket, a garbage can-- in the ladies' room; the
projectionist missed a cue, and the screen was blank for about 15
very long seconds, during which time the audience grew a tad
boisterous. Then it was midnight. "Well," I told my
nervous staff, "This is it. But don't worry. After what
happened already, things can only get better."

As the audience emptied out into the street,
the street emptied into the theater. Pieces of fried chicken and
beer bottles sailed across the lobby. One of my ushers quit when
the main door was taken off its hinges, and another simply locked
himself in the bathroom, which within minutes resulted in THAT
door being taken off its hinges. I called the precinct house and
was told that I'd have to wait because down on Times Square there
was some kind of a problem. "I'M on Times Square!" I
yelled. "Well, then you know what I mean," he said, and
hung up. In the auditorium all sorts of objects, and occasionally
people, were arcing through the air. Many people were playing
boom boxes, though interestingly, no two boom boxes were playing
the same song at any given moment. I told one of my remaining
ushers--probably, it occurs to me now, my only remaining usher--
to tell everybody to shut off their radios or we wouldn't start
the movie. He laughed. I laughed too. We had about 1200 people,
all of them either drunk or really mad because they weren't
drunk, crammed into a theater with 420 seats. The Forum, further
down the square, called. "Can you send over an usher?"
he asked me. "My guys are real busy seating people. We must
have 150 people here. I just need a guy to tear tickets for a
half hour or so."

"Quick," I told my usher, "Get
over to the Forum! It's an emergency!" I thought that was
hilarious. Having now made sure that I was alone in a theatre
with a full scale riot in progress, I buzzed the projectionist to
tell him to start the picture. He did not answer, having left the
premises some moments before, when his door had been taken off
its hinges by the fun loving crowd. The audience began chanting
"ALIEN! ALIEN! ALIEN!", which was not the name of the
movie we were showing, though on the other hand we weren't
showing anything because there was no one to show it.

"Mister," said some guy in what
appeared to be a zoot suit, "You better start dis
movie."

"Why?" I said. "Do you think the
crowd will turn ugly if I don't?" I stepped outside for a
breath of air. Interesting noises began to come from the theater.
I realized that I didn't act quickly and decisively, things would
soon get out of hand. Times Square itself was pretty subdued. And
why not? All the psychos in the city were sitting in the Victoria
Theater, setting each other on fire and eating the seats. I
strolled down to the other end of Times Square, to the Embassy #
1, where nothing at all was happening.

"Hey hey," said the manager, "I
gotta say, I thought Belson was nuts to run these midnight shows,
but it's working out fine. We got almost 30 people inside. You
got a crowd over at the Victoria? Everything okay? What's up?
What are you doing down here?"

"Just getting some air," I said.
"You know the Victoria. No problem. Place practically runs
itself."

* * *

A DAY AT THE BRICK WORKS

Of all the places that we were told in no
uncertain terms not to play near, our favorite was the abandoned
brick works. It was located just outside of town-- you had to
cross the railroad trestle foot bridge 60 feet above the Peckman
River, you had to follow a path that skirted the edge of the
quarry, and you had to pick your way through a junk yard full of
mildewed sofas and Chevy suspension systems to reach it, and then
you had to hop the fence to get inside the grounds. Unlike most
of the places our parents warned us to avoid, the brick works was
legitimately dangerous; there were large, unstable stacks of
bricks all over the place, and large cooling towers, and piles of
unidentifiable waste material, and strange, perfectly round pits
of varying depth; the place was an obvious death trap, and there
were signs all over the place spelling this out in detail,
warning against trespassing and listing all sorts of fines and
punishments for unauthorized people caught on the grounds. We
used to go there for picnics.

Sometimes it would be just Calvano, Picarillo,
and me, and other times Calvano's brother Duff would come, and
from time to time we would encounter picnickers from the nearby
towns of Cedar Grove and Montclair and Caldwell. Sometimes there
was a watchman on duty, but he always parked his car in the shade
of the biggest cooling tower, where it was visible from the junk
yard, and when we caught sight of it, we would find a likely
looking decayed sofa, jump up and down on it a little bit to
scare off the bugs and eat our lunch right there. But lunch
always tasted better inside the brick works.

One afternoon, after we had finished our lunch
and dumped our refuse in the deep pit which was, by common
consent, used as the garbage hole, we were skulking around the
brick works and took a path we'd never taken before; it lead down
hill, past some small buildings that looked vaguely like
industrial versions of beach cabanas, and terminated in a
tailings pond. Actually it was more like a puddle than a pond,
and the water was remarkably foul-looking and foul-smelling. We
circled it. "I gotta feeling something's IN there,"
said Calvano. Undoubtedly, something was-- mostly, whatever
refuse you could rinse out of the big kilns after a busy day of
brick manufacturing-- but we knew what Calvano meant-- he meant
something ALIVE. Something MUTATED. Something probably not unlike
the hideous, flesh-eating Mud Beast in the most recent issue of Tales
from the Tomb. "I think I see a b-bubble," said
Picarillo. We began to back up the path. I thought I saw a
b-bubble, too. But we were tough, gutsy kids, and we waited till
we were a good 20 or 30 feet from the pond before we broke into a
run.

We were all at that awkward age when you know
there's no such thing as a mutant Mud Beast, and yet you wish
there could be; when you know better than to mention to anyone
that you saw the air bubbles of a creature rising to the surface
of the pond because it sensed the presence of fresh meat, yet you
can't stop yourself because it's far and away the most
interesting thing that's ever happened to you, even though, of
course, it didn't.

"You're all morons," said Calvano's
brother Duff. "Everybody knows about the pond. It's a
tailings pond, it's just the place they dumped their garbage.
It's only like three feet deep. We go without rain for a couple
weeks, and it dries up till it rains again. You know what's under
there, when it's dried up? Scuzz."

"What kind of scuzz?" said Calvano
suspiciously.

"Gloppy scuzz at first, then crusty scuzz.
Smelly scuzz at first, then not-so-smelly scuzz when it's been
dried out for a while."

Picarillo was sitting on the edge of the bed,
playing with Calvano's rubber deluxe werewolf mask. "I saw
this boat in the mud, down by the Peckman, when we were crossing
the trestle the other day. One of those little boats? With the
flat ends?"

"A punt," said Duff. "So?"

"I'm just thinking. Suppose we got that
boat and stuck it in the pond, right? We charged kids like 50
cents or something to float out into the middle of the pond. Told
them there was a monster in the pond. Had 'em sitting there for
five minutes with nothing happening."

"Five minutes is a long time to go with
nothing happening," said Duff.

"Yeah. And they'd all be complaining,
wanting their money back and stuff."

"Yeah. So?"

"And then--" Picarillo stuck his fist
in side the werewolf head and pumped it into the air.
"--this MONSTER HEAD comes boiling up through the
water!"

"Man!" said Duff, "That is a
great idea! I gotta tell you, Picarillo, I didn't think you had
it in you! I thought you were maybe slightly SLOW and all, you
know? You got those like squinty eyes and you're kind of big and
clumsy like the kids in special class, and you wear those shirts
with the tail hanging out, but that is a great idea!"

"Thank you," said Picarillo
miserably.

The hardest part of the job was transporting
the punt to the brick works. The punt had been pretty beat up to
start with, and dragging it up the hill, past the quarry and over
the fence did not improve its condition noticeably. Duff brought
a roll of duct tape to repair the bigger holes in the hull.
"This won't hold too long," he said. "Next time we
come, we'll have to bring some of that card board that comes when
you buy a new t-shirt. We'll tape a couple sheets of that over
the holes, for like added strength."

Lackadaisical as he was about the punt, Duff
had put a great deal of thought and work into getting the wolf
head to hit the surface on cue. Basically, he turned it into a
low-powered rocket, with packets of baking soda and vinegar in
the carefully sealed head, and an egg timer, which would go off
after a few minutes and rupture the vinegar bag. It took nearly 7
tries to get this to work at all, and when it did, the head
bobbed to the surface upside down. "Okay," he said.
"I need to weigh down the bottom of the head a little, and I
need a stronger fuel. And thicker gloves, because this water is
making my hands all scaly and gross."

For a couple of weeks, Duff set his not
inconsiderable brainpower to working out this problem. And he
succeeded beyond anyone's wildest hopes.

"It's going to go in two stages," he
said. "Stage one, a small charge-- no more of this baking
soda and vinegar crap, either, we're talking HIGH GRADE
COMBUSTIBLES-- will send all these bubbles churning to the
surface. That charge, in turn, will detonate the MAIN charge, and
the head will break the surface. They'll be about 5 seconds
between the explosions, so everyone will be staring at the exact
spot where the head will pop out. And we set off the first
charge--" he held up a walkie- talkie-- "by radio! Just
like bomb guys in the movies!"

"Or," said Calvano, "like when
you wanted to get into the equipment shed by the football field
last summer, an'--"

Duff whacked his younger brother in the head
several times with the walkie talkie, the universally
acknowledged signal for 'shut up.'

We crept out to the brick works very early one
Saturday morning to try it out. All of us crammed into the punt,
and floated to the middle of the pond. Duff carefully lowered the
doctored wolf head into the water. "We don't want to be too
close to this," he said, "in case something goes
wrong."

What could possibly go wrong?

"HEY! YOU BOYS! WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE
DOING?" It was the watchman, who, we now realized, did not
show up for work until well after 9 AM. "I WANT ALL YOUR
NAMES AND ADDRESSES! YOU BOYS ARE TRESPASSING! I'M GONNA PHONE
ALL YOUR PARENTS!"

"My dad's name is Lawrence Talbot, The
Wolf Man," yelled Duff. "He's taking a dip." He
pressed the button on the walkie-talkie. "HEY, DAD! SOME RUM
BUCKET WANTS TO TALK TO YOU!"

The wolf head broke the surface; three quarters
of the head was visible.

"Waauughh!" said the guard.

"Oops," said Duff, "A tad too
much fuel. That was just the first--"

The second charge went off. The head shot out
of the water and sailed a good 40 feet through the air. It was
burning. The flaming head slammed into the ground and rolled back
down the hill towards the pond. Before it reached us, it blew
apart like a hairy rubber bomb. A chunk of burning wolf-rubber
landed in the punt with us. "Oh, Christ," wailed
Picarillo, "The boat's on fire! Swim for it!"

"Don't touch the water!" screamed
Duff, "It'll give you crocodile skin!" He tried to
stomp out the burning rubber; his foot went right through the
bottom of the punt. Picarillo and I unshipped the broken pool
cues we had brought along in case of an emergency and began to
push the punt towards land. "My shoe is on fire," said
Duff, though his foot had now been submerged for almost a full
minute.

"You're gonna have a crocodile foot,"
said Calvano, with perhaps a trace of envy in his voice.

The guard just stared at us as we beached the
punt and trudged homeward, to watch Duff's foot mutate.